


The Butcher

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, First Time, M/M, Season 11, Suicidal Ideation, dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 19:24:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6091533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end is the end. No point making a fuss.</p>
<p>AU from 10x23 (Brother's Keeper).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Butcher

**Author's Note:**

> I started this a long time ago, so this version of The Darkness has absolutely nothing to do with the show version. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> This one sat right at the edge of my abilities. Huge thanks to [kaligrrrl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kaligrrrl) for her beta, and for getting me closer on the page to what was in my head. Thanks also to nonnie who gave early encouragement. Remaining faults are mine.

“Soda?”

“Water.”

Dean nods and gets out of the car. It's warm today. Good to feel it on his hands, on the back of his neck. He hooks in the gas nozzle and perches on the trunk and lets the heat soak in through the back of his thighs, waits for the click.

Inside he grabs a bag of M&Ms for himself and a bottle for Sam. Water. First thing he's said in six hours, head buried in his book. Dean has been fantasising idly all morning about unrolling his window, plucking the thing out of his hands and tossing it out into the spotty scrub, blitzing by too fast to have a hope of going back for it. 

He hands over a fifty and is a little queasy about the lack of change he gets in return. The cashier stares hard into his eyes while she's handing it over. There'll be a shotgun under the counter. He can't blame her. She's in the middle of nowhere. 

He tries a smile. It's probably a little curdled. She's got the look, and it won't be long for her. A couple of weeks, month tops. He wonders if she knows, if she can feel it pooling and percolating in her blood, her brain, her retinas. They often seem to, somewhere underneath. His charm fails at any rate.

He dings his way out the door with a target on his back and tosses the bottle through his baby's open window. Sam grabs it out of the air, has it cracked open before Dean even gets his ass on the seat. Dean watches him take a few big gulps, throat moving under the shine of sweat and stubble. If he was that fucking thirsty he should have said something earlier. 

“What?” 

“Nothing.” Dean reaches past him and throws the coins into the glove box. Sam twitches.

“That all the change?”

Dean ignores him. Maybe he's thinking it, but he'd never say it. Dean will steal gas before he gets a more fuel-efficient car. 

They keep on south, dusty flatland stretching out. He's not in the mood for these straight Texan roads, glare spiking his vision. Should have grabbed some sunglasses at the gas station. His last pair broke weeks ago, knocked off his face up in Spokane, and he hasn't been far enough south since then for the sun to be a problem. 

They hit the other side of Amarillo and Sam hits the end of his book and closes it, turns it in his hands a few times, ruffles through the pages again like it's a flip book. Hell, it probably is. Most of those things are written by nutjobs. People are either crazy going into this game or crazy coming out of it. 

“You're gonna go through Plainview?”

Confusion in Sam's voice. He's staring out the window, his familiar sharp profile back to messing with Dean's sightlines, interrupting half the country. Dean can look over there and see him any time. If he wants.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Didn't you hear? It got sectioned.”

“May as well section the whole country,” Dean mutters, sour taste in his mouth. Sam does the huffy thing he does and runs his hand through his hair.

“They had a bad – never mind. It'll be swarming. We gotta go around.”

“How far around?”

The map is in the back seat and Sam has to twist and stretch to reach it. Dean keeps his eyes forward, pale yellow paper flashing in his periphery. Strange to have someone here to spread out the map on the dash, wear the creases weaker and fuzzier. 

“I'm guessing they'll have a checkpoint in Tulia.”

Dean curls his lip. Say goodbye to the highways, then. 

“You couldn't have told me before we got on the 27?” He's unable to stop himself sounding peeved, and Sam shrugs.

“I figured you knew.”

Dean sighs and looks for an exit, heads back east on the kind of road that counts itself lucky to be asphalt at all. Sam's gonna take them 200 miles out of their way down these nasty back roads, an extra three or four hours depending on how hard he can push his girl, and the proximity's already starting to wear on them both, setting up an itch in his brain. 

This was a mistake. What had possessed him to say yes? Siren call of the old days. Managed to somehow forget that the old days was this too, sitting inarticulate next to his brother, inadequate in Sam's judgement.

Sam finishes studying the new route and folds the map all back-asswards, tosses it over his shoulder. Dean darts another look at him and thinks for the hundredth time since Sam bent himself back into the car that he's too pale, spending too much time in the bunker. He can feel it tilt into obsession, wondering about what his brother does with his days now. He's too skinny. His hair is the same. Who does he let cut it? One of those nerds he's got down there? Do they ever kick back or is it work work work?

Going so far out it takes them until eleven to run down a place to stay. Not a moment too soon. Dean is about to give up and suggest the car, back be damned, when he sees the sign, broken neon and deep relief opening up to take him. Running county roads in the dark with Sam here is too much, calls him back to that day after he lost the Mark, taking Sam back to the bunker: high beams punching through the endless night, no sun, no moon, no stars, scant streetlights on the fritz. Never able to shake the loss of the light when he looked at his brother. 

Well, he hadn't had to live that for long, and it'll go the same here.

Ma and Pa Kettle of the Vanity Motel have turned their check-in into a drive-through. Dean leans out the window and asks for the ground floor, takes his keys with a nod of approval. Second set of locks for every door and window, looks like. Smart people. 

Down outside room fifteen he gets out of the car and takes a look around the mostly empty lot, stretching and cracking his back until the tightness eases. There's a sedan over in the corner that looks like one he passed back before Amarillo. 1997 Camry, grey. Probably nothing. 

“Gettin' old,” Sam says over the bright-shining roof of his baby, sly tease pulling at his mouth. Dean shoots him the finger. Grabs his duffel out the back seat and the machetes 'n' more bag out of the trunk, and has his mind on wearing out the next hour or so with a whetstone and a blade when he passes behind Sam, and Sam freezes in a way that makes the hairs go up on the back of Dean's neck, twists his stomach with something black and disgusting.

He keeps moving, he keeps moving, into the room, bags on the bed, TV check: fuzzy but he's had worse; hot water check: burns the tips of his fingers and the mirror fogs up and covers him over while his brother moves on the other side of the wall.

::

There's an amphisbaena guarding the codex or diary or _My Little Pony_ fanfiction or whatever it is that Sam has brought him way out here for, a nasty one, dry as the desert sand and strong. Dean watches her through binoculars from a ridge, as she lips through the sand for something wet with her front head. Back head? One of her heads.

He thinks she eats a scorpion, ruffling her scabby little wings in pleasure.

“We'll wait until dawn. She's too alert in the day.”

“What about dusk?” Sam asks, shading his eyes, gawking up at the sky.

“You wanna take her on at night?”

Sam purses his lips and grabs the binoculars, watches for a long second. Too thin, Dean thinks again, cheekbones and jawline too eloquent, dusty t-shirt close on his skin. At least he's still got some muscle.

“It doesn't look as dumb as they do in the pictures,” Sam says grudgingly.

Dean takes the glasses and looks again. Ugly sonofabitch. Her back head is up and alert, like she thinks she's a dog. They'll bunk down in the car tonight. She won't come this far, not with that little shrine to guard, but he'll sleep easier with a bit of metal between them. Not that it would make a difference. Only other one of these he's seen clawed through a concrete wall to get her hunter.

They waste time sharpening sharp blades and cleaning clean guns, sitting cross-legged on blankets, fanning out the collection in front of them. Dean casts his eye over them with satisfaction. He's divested himself of any frippery or sentiment in the last four months and these are a mean and ruthless bunch. Business weapons. 

He slides the Ka-Bar back in its scabbard, glances up at Sam.

“Should have gotten you to bring the katana, coulda had some fun.”

Sam grins at him over a broken rifle. 

“Yeah, chopping your own head off. That would be kinda hilarious. You have a plan?” 

“Think I'll just go right at her. She looks pretty slow.”

Sam narrows his eyes, like he can tell that Dean has no clue how fast or slow a lizard monster in the desert is going to be.

“You know it's poisonous, right? We need to do this at a distance.”

Dean hums acknowledgement and tests the blade of his boot knife for nicks.

They pack up as the sun turns grey and settle their backs against warm rock, eating gas station sandwiches that don't feel particularly refrigerated when Dean pulls them out of the cooler. He eyes the ham and tries to calculate the odds of surviving past tomorrow morning anyway.

Dean holds out his bottle and Sam shakes his head. Perhaps he doesn't drink rye anymore. Perhaps he only drinks out of crystal tumblers. He sits a few feet away from Dean and eats methodically, leaning over so he doesn't drop any slaw on the book he has open on his lap. The familiarity of it makes Dean's chest ache. 

Maybe he stares too long. Sam looks up at him, sharp, and Dean flicks his gaze away over the desert floor. She's settling down herself, curling close about. One of her heads is still raised and pointed their way, lamp-eyes shining. He waves at her and takes a bite of his sandwich, wincing when his teeth come down on grit. 

Dean hates the goddamn desert.

“Tammy hacked the CDC the other day,” Sam says, still staring at him, and starts going on about isolated networks and Russia and five-star authentication or some such. Dean closes his ears and nods at the right points, tips his head back against the rock and watches the sky change.

::

Clotted choke of iron. Throat thick with it. Dreaming again. Thrashing underwater this time, sunk to the bottom with someone under his hands, pushing them face down into the river mud and they won't stop resisting, kicking him, cursing, and he pushes and pushes until he's half buried himself, plunged elbow deep into the sucking dirt and then it's too late to pull free.

Sam wakes him, reaching over the back of the seat, palm flat to Dean's chest. Dean slaps his hand away and curls his body towards the foot well in case he throws up.

“It's okay, you were dreaming,” Sam says, voice soft. Dean could kill him. It's too late in the night for such pointlessness. “Dean?”

Dean grunts and props himself against the passenger door, fumbles for his flask and knocks some back. His stomach settles with the burn and it clears his head. Just a dream, nothing new there. He's okay, he's fine.

He drinks and waits until Sam gives up and lies back down, endless soft rustle of clothes and blanket, breaths and half-breaths through his nose, awake and annoyed on the other side of the seat. It's so dark, moon just out of new, stars blazing but the land around them barely more than an alien glimmer. It's freezing. There's no one else out here. Just them and the monster. 

Dean hates the goddamn desert.

::

It takes half an hour to hike down to her and she's waiting for him, more awake than he'd like with the chill still in the air.

He stands in front of her and twirls the machetes a couple of times to warm up his wrists. She tracks the movement, lowering her heads and opening her mouths. Her claws flex and he can hear them scrape against rock.

“Sorry sweetheart,” he says, and she tilts her front head. “It's just the job.”

She charges, slick and close to the ground. When he moves it feels like a tired shade of what it once did and it still feels good, clarion call of muscle-memory, of purpose.

The sun is cold, half under the horizon. Her blood is hotter.

::

Sam rounds the bottom of the ridge at some pace, spots him and slides to a stop, skidding in the thin layer of loose sand, and turns right around and stalks back the way he came, stiff with fury, hand clenched around the barrel of the rifle.

Dean didn't take any water to wash in and even after wiping himself down with his shirts he's still filthy. His jeans are rapidly turning into plate armour. The stench sits in his throat and rolls his stomach. It seems to take a lot longer to walk up than it did to walk down.

Back at the car Sam leans the gun carefully against a rock before grabbing a gallon of water and Dean's bag out the trunk. He stands tall and righteous in front of Dean, muscle in his jaw jumping, eyes dark and narrow, scanning Dean's chest, his arms. Dean wads the shirts in his hand self-consciously.

“Did it bite you?”

“Not a scratch. And guess what your good brother brought you.” Dean raises an eyebrow and pulls the little chapbook out of his back pocket, waves it in the air. Sam's glare grows even more affronted. He throws the bottle and the duffel at Dean's feet, and the lid pops off the water. They both stare down as it glugs into the dust. 

So much for gratitude. 

Sam's lips thin to a bloodless line. He snatches at the book and Dean is pissed enough now to pull his hand back, bring Sam forward an unconscious step and too close, toe-to-toe almost, Dean's skin exposed to the air and crawling with goosebumps, and danger sharp as a bullet in the space between them. Dean used to be able to coil his brother up like this and take the hit when it landed and love it, to have Sam loom at him with fire in his eyes. 

It's beyond him now. His face burns hot and he surrenders instantly, lets Sam wrench the book from his hand and turn his back again, leaving Dean alone with the dregs of the water, to salvage himself in whatever way he can.

::

He points the car north, careful bumping over raw ground until they get back to the road. With Plainview out of the equation he'll have to rethink the whole route, but it's not even nine yet. They can do it in a day, barring the unforeseen. Sam's got what he needed, has the book cracked before they get ten feet. The thing's blotted and dark with age and dense spindly writing. Sam tilts it carefully towards the light and starts reading, drops it with a noise of disgust.

Dean hums a question and Sam flicks him a dismissive look. Dean is too busy trying to preserve his baby's undercarriage to care.

“Parchment. Baby skin,” Sam mutters, and picks it up again gingerly. It makes a faint unpleasant leathery sound all the way through Texas. Jesus. They must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel if they're reduced to lore made out of little kids.

They eat lunch late and on the go, Sam transcribing laboriously on a notepad balanced on his knee, and then afternoon disappears into evening and they meet up with the river and they're back in Kansas before Dean's really prepared himself for it. He's still vaguely baffled at the sameness of it all. A few extra overgrown fields sure, a few extra misspelled biblical passages on water towers, but the same bends in the road, the same gentle patchwork flow of the land. Same graffiti colouring the bunker door. The garage opens just the same, that shuddering hesitation at the halfway point. His scalp tingles as they pass under and through the wards, engine echoing thickly off the concrete, a sound he'd never thought he'd hear again. 

It only feels natural then to get out of the car, shake his arms out. His stomach growls and he makes some rote joke he doesn't even hear as he's saying it, follows Sam down the stairs and through corridors to the control room, mouth dry, a tight sense of unease growing in his chest; he can barely nod as Sam gives him the brush-off and heads through and out of the library. Dean leans against the arch and puts his hands in his pockets and looks around.

Sam's nerds are set up at the table, lamps going, dim night-time study. For some reason he'd thought he'd recognise them, had pictured them looking like Ash or Kevin, but they're strangers pulled out of a strange world. Sam had grabbed one by the shoulder as he'd passed and murmured a quick word in her ear; she seems to still be feeling the effects, colour in her cheeks and wide eyes staring up at Dean. The kid across from her covers his mouth. 

Dean raises an eyebrow at them, ego blooming a little, and maintains his mystery, looks around for more changes.

There's a whiteboard set up in the corner of the library, brushed blue with some brief sketched schematics, a few book titles, several underlined heavily. Some symbols. Chore list with three names: today is Sam's turn to do laundry. Running down the right side is a neat tally, the first ten or so marks in black, the rest in red. Dean frowns at it until he realises and then reels, aghast. Days since. Why would Sam do that to himself?

He steps down into the room and checks the liquor cabinet: barren, fucking typical.

“You got anything to drink in this place? Besides Kool-Aid?”

The nerds look at each other and then back at him. The kid takes his headphones out of his ears.

“Yeah,” he says, and clears his throat. “In the kitchen.”

Dean nods, purses his lips. Of course. 

He traces Sam's steps down to the quarters, two pairs of eyes burning into his back, jumpstarting his nerves. His room is lifeless, painted in a layer of dust like when he'd come back from being a demon. No rotting food this time but still the dead scatter of someone who'd expected to return. No one's been sitting in here pining, then. 

The stash under his bed is empty. Him or someone else? He can't even remember. 

He shuts his door behind him and pauses. Surely there'd be some booze in Sam's room; he can't have changed that much. But what would that look like, knocking on his brother's door. He goes left instead, quiet and unseen in the dark hallways like he's not really here and slips into the kitchen, uses the light on his phone to rifle through the shelves. It's all cans and potatoes and cauliflower, stacked bags of rice and a big can of oil, and his fingers brush over them with the light haste of rising panic. 

A rustle behind him. The light flicks on and he whirls, a guilty, caught-out feeling dropping his stomach, pounding his heart.

Sam's at the top of the stairs, hands braced on either side of opening, face unreadable. He nods towards the sink and Dean follows his gaze. A few bottles jumbled together over in the corner. Something from Kentucky, half empty. Dean's not thirsty anymore, doesn't want a bit of it. He's running hot and irritated now, eyes scratchy when he blinks. It's too bright in here. Sam probably changed the globes to something that passes some kind of standard, submitting them all to this artificial glare. 

He juts out his chin and meets Sam's eyes, firms his voice. “I'm heading out.”

Sam nods slowly, sour twist to his mouth. 

“You should get some sleep. It's past midnight.”

“I'm good.”

Sam chews the inside of his lip. He's washed his face, changed his clothes, put on an old grey flannel. His feet are bare. Dean gets stuck on that, on the midnight comfort of his brother padding around this place, eating here, sleeping here, living here still. It's too real. 

He swallows hard and looks around the room. It's as clean and spare and functional as it ever was. It doesn't seem right that it's still the same. He should never have come down here. 

“Cas was gonna stop by in the morning. He's got a lead on the coven.”

It sounds desperate enough to be a lie. Dean doesn't understand why he'd bother. 

“He knows where to find me.” 

“He can't go around making house calls, Dean, she moves too quickly. She hides too well.”

Dean shrugs, evaluates his options. Sam's blocking the short route to the garage but he could leave through the door by his side and Sam couldn't stop him. 

“Wait,” Sam says, voice rising, holding out his hand. “You need something to eat. Stay for a drink at least.”

Or Dean could force it. Dean could go to him, grab his hand out of the air and twist it behind his back until he cries out, turn him, put him down, close enough to smell his sweat, see his muscles tremble. It wouldn't be unprecedented. 

“No, Sam.” Dean makes it quiet and final, forced past his heart beating hard in his throat, and bows out the door.

::

He waits until he's crossed the Platte before he seeks out a small hook of road to hide the car in and crashes in the back seat with a disturbing depth of oblivion, no dreams he can remember, drool caking his cheek when he wakes. His gun's tangled in the blanket he's kicked down against the door, sun already past the window and doing its frail best to cook the roof. His skull is splitting.

Six hours he was out, he calculates with a chill, scanning the fields to his right and the sparse trees to his left for movement. Wasn't even sleeping one off. Christ. He got lucky. 

The clouds come in as he heads further north. In town, the streets are empty and grey, and the temperature's plummeted by the time he takes the turnoff to Jody's place, fat splats of rain following him down the long drive. He has half a mind to turn right back around for Texas.

Jody's not in the house when he lets himself in and he heads on through to Gretchen's room, dumps his bags, pulls the scotch out of the bedside drawer. He takes a swig from the bottle and has quick flip through messages Donna's left him in her big sweetheart handwriting; looks like someone at the bunker has put together a hunt up in Maine, bodies turning up mutilated: deer, a ranger, even a bear. They could have just told him while he was there.

He drops the papers where he found them and pokes around the house to see if Gretchen's here, if she's up for it. He's full of a restless shiver and he wants it gone. The drink's not helping.

The shed and the garage are empty, and the pickup's gone. Supply run, must be. Down in the basement he throws a few more logs into the furnace, stokes the coals, warms his hands a little. Upstairs someone is hammering away at something. Ana, probably, reinforcing her window barricade. Dean should probably go up there and try to interrupt her paranoia but he's too roadworn for the inevitable escalation. Best to let it play out. 

Gretchen's room is facing north and is sheltered by a deep porch. Not a lot of sun makes it in. It gets cold, reminds him of the depths of the bunker, how if you didn't leave a light on purposefully you'd be blind, no natural light filtering its way down those twisting halls. He locks the door and leaves the lamp off, sinks into the deep armchair in the corner. Checks his cell, plugs it in. Nothing new, not surprising. Difficult to get reliable reception even after all the services got nationalised. Who would call him, anyway?

The rain is even thicker now, drumming against the house, leeching colour out of the world. The drafts carry a sharp fresh smell. He pulls off his boots, cracks his toes and feels the ease seep into his bones, making him heavy. 

He has another drink and licks his lips clean and settles the bottle between his legs, a nice bit of pressure. Breathes deep. He's drowsy again but it's still sparking, all that road, the kill, all that time out in the sun. Not alone. 

Bottle on the floor, runs his palm up his thigh and his dick is ready for it, ready for his hand. Would have been better if Gretchen were here, waiting for him, dirtied up from her work maybe, with her teeth white and gleaming, brushing her hair away from her face and realising the burn he had in his blood, hustling him into the room and pressing him down backwards onto the chair, strong hand splayed on his chest while she blew him and he opened his knees wide to fit her shoulders.

::

Next morning he starts the long trek up to Maine, right up where the air smells like deodorant and everything's named after a saint or a lake. The trees are settling down, ready to take the snow. He leaves the car on a service road, hooks his bag over his shoulder, kicks his way through leaf-litter and keeps his eyes peeled and shotgun ready for a bad one that's somehow made it all the way out here without drowning itself or clawing its way into the wrong Unabomber shack.

He gets it wrong though. A pack of skinwalkers ambush him, three of them, ripping fast through the undergrowth. The lead one rushes him and he gives it two shots to the gut, nearly splitting it in half before he's knocked off his feet, taking his weight on his left shoulder with a bone-rattling thud that he's gonna have to worry about later. 

He kicks it off of his legs and puts his back to the biggest tree in arm's reach, chambers another shell with a grunt. Should have brought the double-barrel. The other two have decided to diversify; the girl's a big wolf-like dog now, and she circles to his weak side as the dude grabs a branch off the ground and rushes him. She's the real danger so he lets the guy have his back and takes an extra second to aim; one shot puts her down and he drops with her, counting on the guy to swing high. The branch shaves through his hair and he kicks out, breaks the guy's knee backwards and lets him crawl away.

She's twitching, trying to stand again, her dogface a blasted ruin, and he ransacks his bag for the mag of silver, slams it into his pistol and puts her out of her misery. She's already melting back into human by the time he tracks down the wounded one and puts a bullet in the back of his skull. 

It takes half hour to haul the bodies into a clearing and find wood dry enough to burn. This mechanical after-work work used to be soothing. Banter or a comfortable tired silence, or the car radio going. Just empty time now, stretching out ahead: the burn, the hike to the car, the drive out of the woods, the drive after, state lines blipping by. 

He lights them up and walks a couple of wider circles to find more wood. Better this were over quickly. The sun's past its height in the sky and his joints are aching with the cold and the adrenaline come-down. He tests his shoulder, gets his arm above the horizontal before it starts to twinge. Should be fine. It takes a load of sticks and brush anyway.

A tree at the edge of the clearing is the right shape to settle himself against, sitting on his bag to keep his ass dry. He zips up his jacket and jams his hands in his pockets. Should have brought a book or something. Gonna be a boring afternoon staring at trees for hours. It's deep into fall and some still don't seem to know whether to turn or not, giving the place an uncertain dappled effect. 

Has he been here before? He recognised Eagle Lake when he passed through a ways back, couldn't forget a motel named the Overlook. Just after Stanford maybe? That razor-shins hunt, something about the slant of Sam's eyes with the birch going golden behind him that feels like it could have been here, this very spot, picturesque enough to jolt his brother out of his loss, looking over at Dean with a smile like this was where he wanted to be and Dean, Christ, he was desperate enough in those days that he'd practically danced.

Dean grimaces and stands, cracks his back, gets back under the cover of the trees. More burnable shit is what he needs to get this done and get out of here, get back to work. Seeing his brother again has fucked him up. He should have expected it. It's gonna pull him right out of his game if he's not careful. 

Crowley is waiting for him at the fire, warming his hands over the pop of humanoid fat. Dean drops his meagre collection of sticks on the flames and sighs, scrubs at his face, his eyes already dry and grainy with smoke. 

“Got a minute?”

“Got a drink?”

“As it happens,” Crowley says, and pulls sixteen ounces of something expensive-looking from an inside pocket of his jacket. They sit down in the glow of Dean's dead and share the bottle back and forth. There's a slight stiffness to Crowley's movements still, despite him looking whole and unharmed. Cas really did a number on him. 

The level in the bottle drops lower. Dean turns it over in his hands. Some unpronounceable Scottish town on the label. It actually tastes good, although the smell of burning hair lingers on his tongue and tries its best to spoil the moment. Fucking skinwalkers. They're rats. They feed off the edges of human lives. What the hell were they doing out here? 

Everything's upside down.

Well, they're dead now. Their bones start appearing in the fire, and Dean takes a healthy toast to send them on their way. 

“You're supposed to savour it, not guzzle it like a two-year-old with his first jug of red cordial,” Crowley drawls, and Dean looks at him. He holds up his hands. “Not that I'm complaining. You're not exactly a happy sober.”

“Say your piece, Crowley.” 

Crowley raises an offended eyebrow and inspects his nails.

“I need a favour.”

“No.”

“For old times' sake?”

“No.”

“New times'?”

“No.”

Crowley draws a breath and hesitates, speculation in his eyes that makes Dean sag with exhaustion. Game after endless fucking game with this one. Even when Dean was a demon he'd found it boring.

“Your brother tried to kill me a few months back, you know,” Crowley says. “Nearly did. I still haven't repaid him for that one. How about for his sake?”

Dean shakes his head, passes the bottle back to him and under the movement slips a knife between his ribs. Crowley looks down at his hand, back up. Dean is very close to him now, can feel the puff of his breath. The whole right side of his face has a subtle palsy.

“Poor form, Winchester.”

Dean pulls away again, grate of blade against bone singing up the knife, and wipes it clean on the ground.

“Guess you're not as weak as you look.”

Crowley snarls. 

“Guess you're as pathological as you always look.”

“No need to be rude.” Dean waves the bottle. “You've got sixty seconds.”

“Speaking of payback. My _mother_.” He spits the word like a pip. 

“Cas is looking for her.”

“Screw the angel. What about you? You owe that bitch an ending.”

Dean shrugs, lets himself breathe easy and smooth. The smoke is hazing into the twilight now and he feels deceptively warm. 

“Above my pay grade.”

“Ah, I forgot. You mostly just kill your own kind these days.”

“They're not _my kind_.” He tosses the bottle on the embers, brief insurrectionist blaze flaring as the dregs and the label catch fire, splintering glass. 

“Don't be so sure.” Crowley stands, brushes down his suit and sniffs. “A disappointment as always, Dean. Don't fall asleep at the wheel, whatever you do. How on earth could we cope without you?”

The drunk doesn't wear down as quickly as the fire and it's an unsteady walk to the car, flashlight on the tree trunks fleeting and dishonest. He sleeps it off in the backseat and his back is frozen when he wakes, boot-laden feet twisted and jammed into the foot well. The light is grey and cold enough that he can't tell if it's morning or afternoon.

It takes fifteen minutes to right himself, spasms halting him every few inches. He sucks the inside of his lip between his teeth and lets the pain keep him on track. Ibuprofen in the glove compartment. Aquafina on the seat. Tastes like plastic but does the job. Ugly smoke smell sunk into his jacket and his skin. Birds outside squabbling in the gold and rust. 

He rubs the crust from his eyes and starts the car. She rumbles to life sweet and easy as she ever has and he hangs his hat on that feeling, lets her carry him slowly down the track. Takes him about an hour before he needs to pull over again, scouts an isolated junk-stuffed mailbox, and crowbars his way into an abandoned house. He clears it carefully, too busted for a fight if there's a bad one trapped somewhere, but the house is forgotten and soulless and the people who left didn't know how to leave properly, necessities like tarps and rope left in the garage, painkillers and antibiotics left in the bathroom. He helps himself.

Doesn't take much work to get another fire going with old newspaper and a dusty teddy bear and some spidery logs. The chimney is half clogged so the room gets bleary quick but the heat on his face is a blessing. He tips furniture in front of all the major points of entry and sets himself up a little station with a recliner, rolls a towel for his lower back and takes his boots off, puts his gun on his lap and lets himself drift away.

The trees follow him, surround him, and in them he finds a tall black body that drops like a stone under all the vicious backhand force he can summon; sandpaper and sap skin when he rips with his fingers, endless legs that wrap around his and tumble him into the leaf dirt as he tears and tears and wells up sap, blood-red and viscid, from his hands and the body, drooling down the trunks and over his face as he cranes his neck up to see it whirring like demon-smoke over the tree-tops, covering the sun.

::

Donna's on the kitchen phone when he gets back. He dumps his bag on the table and claps her on the shoulder as he passes, cracks a beer out of the fridge and opens the pantry. Jerky. There was definitely some jerky in here before he left.

“Oh yah, no worries, take your time,” she says into the phone, and looks up at Dean, muffles the handset on her chest. Her eyes and hair are so bright and she fits in so well here amidst the cream tiles, the lace curtains, the light pine of the cabinets. He doesn't know how she used to live before, but she made the shift to the farmhouse with ease. “How'd it go, killer?”

Dean gives her a grin and waggles his eyebrows, grabs a packet of Aunt May's All Beef Ringburner and rips it open with his teeth. He kicks the pantry closed and leans against the door.

“I'm here aren't I?”

“Sure are,” she says, and looks him up and down with a wink. 

He winks back and finishes his beer, tosses it in the bin and starts unloading all the crap he scavenged from his little home away from home. Mostly medicine, which he piles in a perilous stack for Alex to inventory. 

“Ooooh, what you – uh huh, uh huh,” Donna says back into the phone, twisting the cord in her fingers. “Got a pen? These are probably off just a tad because Claire got a concussion and is, well, a little fuzzy on the particulars. But in fourteen days we're talking eight neutral outta maybe twenty. Yeah, give or take. Dean, you got any numbers for me?”

Dean shakes his head, heart sinking, cursing his timing. He opens the fridge, hooks his fingers around the necks of a couple more bottles, hikes his duffel back over his shoulder.

“What, the whole time?”

“The whole time.” He stuffs the jerky in his pocket and turns for the door. 

She's in the way, face tight and uncertain in hope.

“Well, do ya think that's maybe a good sign?”

“No,” he grunts, but Donna's nodding and listening and holding the phone out to him, ignores his lack of free hands until Dean sighs, shoves the beer under his armpit and takes it.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” says Sam. He sounds a little strained but that could be the reception. “How long were you out there for?”

“Four, five days. So uh, I'm gonna head in for some shut-eye.”

“Oh yeah, yeah. Of course. Sorry.”

Dean turns the handset into his shoulder, curves away from Donna as she ducks under the cord, and casts his eye to the ceiling. Takes a deep breath.

“It was skinwalkers. Up in Maine. Furthest out I've ever seen them.”

“That's odd.” 

“And they've opened up the 90 around Syracuse again.”

“Good, that's good. We'll update the maps.” Sam clears his throat. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” It dies in the silence, uncertain, aborted. 

“I've been translating the--” Sam starts, but Dean rushes over him.

“Yeah, take it easy,” he says, and tosses the phone back to Donna, and books it.

::

He wakes tired, dry-mouthed and vaguely nauseous, head pounding. Headaches when you wake up is a tumour thing, he thinks he read somewhere. Maybe it's that, growing in his brain. Maybe that's why everything's so wrong.

Gretchen's sitting straight and tall above him, reading, back resting against the headboard, book angled towards the lamp.

“What's–” his voice breaks, and he coughs and tries again. “What time is it?”

“Midnight-ish.”

Twelve hours, save his soul. 

“Why'd you let me sleep that long?”

“Seemed like you needed it,” she says with a shrug, and turns the page. Irritation swells under his skin and he grits his teeth. The lamp is like a lobotomy spike in his eyes.

“Jesus, Gretch,” he snaps. “I can't handle anything longer than five hours. You know that.”

Gretchen looks down at him, raises an eyebrow.

“So sorry. I guess I forgot you weren't capable of setting an alarm.”

Dean scowls at her and then gives it up, sighs and bends his mouth in apology, pushes himself up to sitting. His head takes a moment to catch up. Gretchen shifts, puts down her book and hands him a glass of water and some aspirin and he gulps them down, grabs his jacket from where it was acting as a second blanket and puts it on, shoves his hands back under the quilt. It's not even November yet but the air here gets so frigid and dry at night the scabs on his knuckles keep splitting and never quite heal. 

She smooths her thumb against his temple and makes a moue of sympathetic pain. Her lips are chapped; her nose red. The chill gets to her even worse than him and he always wakes to find her feet digging into his legs, two pairs of socks and still leeching his heat. She's doing it now, dipping a foot under his, her knee digging into his thigh. He rests a hand on it.

“You wanna–?”

“Not for a couple more days. But I could–?”

“Nah, I'm fine.”

He lets the silence take over, strokes her knee absent-mindedly. It's spirit-cold in here; he half expects his breath to frost. When Sam had lost his puppy fat and started shooting up he was like an ice block more often than not and Dad had decided to spend that winter in Montana of course, podunk town without even a movie theatre he could take his brother to, snow in the streets and unreliable gas in the trailer and they had spent so many nights together under blankets, innocent, innocent, he would never – 

He shoves the quilt back and stands, fluttery panic making his skin clammy, ignoring Gretchen's indignant grunt. Jeans and boots, yesterday's; Christ, he stinks, stale and that smoke just won't leave him be, it lingers like a kicked fucking puppy.

No one else is up, house dark and quiet. He sticks some bread in the toaster, slams the lever a couple of times before it catches. Cracks a beer and stares out the window. As he's watching the fence security light trips on, a deer or something feral fleeing into the darkness, just a murky shape. He stands there for a long time but it doesn't reappear, the light clicking off after a few minutes, just the half-moon night out there, with its countryside blanket of stars. Polaris. Orion, and in his wake the dogs. Too many stories he's heard about those goddamn dogs over the years. He wishes he could go back to when the stars were illegible.

He shoves a piece of cold toast in his mouth, grabs another drink and heads through to the lounge room. 

Jody's on watch in the bay window, propped up on cushions, cradling her .32. She's already looking his way when he comes in the doorway, eyes in dark shadow, measuring. 

“Jodes,” he grunts, mostly because she hates it. She tilts the rifle towards him and mimes pulling the trigger, soft _putt_ sound.

“Wondering when you'd make an appearance.”

He waves his toast in the air like it's an answer, nods towards the window.

“You see what that was?”

“Some kinda cat. The feral ones get real big around here.”

“Huh.” Dean chews his breakfast, regretting the jelly, tongue-tied in sugar-glue. “Don't you have work tomorrow?”

She frowns at him.

“I quit, Dean. Weeks ago.”

“Huh,” Dean says again, and covers his embarrassment by testing the couch cushions, finding the right spot for his feet on the coffee table. His head is calm, finally, brain sucking up the glucose and the beer. He hadn't really had a real meal in a while, and he starts to feel dickish about waking up in such a shitty mood. “Bet they didn't like that.”

She shrugs.

“This is where it's at for now.”

For now. Dean snorts to himself, under her sharp look, and digs the remote from where it's jammed between the armrest and the seat. The décor in this place offends his soul. Flowers and crap everywhere. Jody and Donna got rid of the worst of it but there was nothing they could do about the wallpaper or upholstery. At least whoever had lived here before had good taste in home electronics. 

“Infomercials,” Jody says, and Dean obliges.

“You want me to take watch? I just came out here for the TV anyway.”

“I'm not taking watch. I just sleep better out here.”

Her rifle says different but he lets it go. She drops off after an hour or so anyway and he turns the TV down, lets it flicker over him, only flipping channels when a televangelist pops up. 

When it's light enough to read the cross-stitched verses on the cushions and the floorboards start creaking above his head he gets moving, puts a bag together and walks the perimeter, fixing wire, kicking rocks, picking up trash that collects against the fence, cutting back brush encroaching from the wild fields next door. He finds three rabbits in various ages of dead and eaten. Killer looks to be feline, like Jody said. Not human at any rate. 

When he gets to the far corner he sits on a stump and munches on some more jerky. A frosty day but clear for a change, pale sun on the fields. From a distance the grass looks lush and shorn. Trudging through it's a different matter, boots soaked, damp up past your shins. Claire's been making noise about sheep or llamas, to help keep it down. Property's only a few acres so it shouldn't be hard to make the fences stronger. If this is really where Jody and Donna want to stay. 

Back at the little cluster of buildings Gretchen's up on the roof, fixing up the new satellite or resetting the tripwires or something. She stands in silhouette, legs skinny in jeans, jacket puffballing out her body, and waves at him. He salutes her with his beer and then drops it without thought, whirling and grabbing for the pistol at the small of his back as gunfire pops to his left. He's a few steps down before he registers that it's too regular for a fight. 

Jody must have the girls out at the targets. 

He swears, puts his gun away, kicks at his lunch. The bottle's mostly empty. He finishes the dregs and tosses his trash in the bag. Turns away from the farmhouse and checks out the surrounding fields, the scraggly stand of trees lining the creek on the property next door. It's much bigger than theirs. Owners must be dead or shy. From what he heard Jody and Donna made plenty of noise shifting their operation here and no one's shown up yet to tell them to scram.

Too close to town, he's tried to tell them. And town too close to Sioux Falls, but they won't listen, still held by the call of the familiar. But it's a thin, bloody world they're living in now and the familiar has never been as stable or as much a refuge as Dean would have liked, even in the good times, brief and bright as they were.

::

Ballard County, KY has a few disappearances that he lets Jody convince him needs to be a group exercise, hustling him out to the garage even as the sun starts to peek over the trees. Yawning fit to break his jaw, he's halfway down the drive before he notices Claire camped out in the backseat, defiant set to her face when he frowns at her in the rear view.

“Let me guess. There's no room in the truck.”

“Well there isn't.”

An argument's more likely, only Jody and the other two taking up space in there, but he's not about to start quibbling, and she seems happy enough to travel in silence for the first couple of hours at least, scratching away at a journal or whatever. It bugs him at first, irregular noise coming from the wrong direction, but he gets _Master of Puppets_ on and lets the road put him in the zone.

Half an hour out of Sioux City she puts her journal away and starts fidgeting with the zip of her jacket.

“Hey, Dean?”

She says it quiet enough that he can pretend not to have heard it over the music. He makes a big show of checking his blind spot and changing lanes.

“Dean?”

“Mmm?”

“Is Cas okay?”

This is happening, apparently. He turns the music down.

“Huh?”

“I said is Cas okay.”

“He's fine.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Sam does. And he goes to the bunker sometimes.”

“Oh. I didn't know that.”

Christ. He always ends up feeling like an asshole whenever he talks to one of the girls. This is why he avoids it.

“He's fine, okay? He'll get in touch with you when he can. I'll get Donna to mention it to Sam next time she calls through the numbers.”

He darts a glance over his shoulder and catches her nodding slowly, eyes fixed out the window. 

“Why don't you live there anymore?”

Dean shrugs.

“Jody asked me to stay with you guys.”

“Only after you brought Ana here. And Ana said you were driving around a long time before you found her.”

“Is that what she said?”

She shoots him a deadpan glare, unimpressed. He grins at her in the rear view and she turns pointedly away again. She's plaited her hair back hard and severe today, like she's going into war. He doesn't like it. 

“Yeah, I was driving around a while. What is this, a hunt or a therapy session?”

She shrugs.

“I miss Sam, is all. Is he not allowed to come to our place?”

“What are you going on about? Of course he's allowed. He's just busy with his nerds.”

“Yeah, they seem annoying.”

“Annoying?” He frowns. “No, they're – they're doing their part, like you are.”

“Oh. I thought it was 'cause of the nerds you didn't live there.”

Live there. The thought buzzes in Dean's head and he swallows, dry-mouthed.

“No, ah. I. Hunting's out here. Gretchen's out here.”

“Yeah, no, of course,” Claire says. He barely hears it, turns the music back up and she spends another hour combing through a couple of books, throwing out lore here and there about nixies. Dean already knows it all. Wedged between reapers and a bunch of blacked-out stuff about De Moines are three pages in his dad's journal devoted to the time his dad thought the hot naked chick in the river was the victim. He makes noises that he hopes are taken for signs of interest, but he must not be very convincing and when they break for lunch she decamps to the truck. 

Jody makes a quizzical face at him and he watches Claire throw her bag into the back next to Ana, Alex turning around in the passenger seat completely so the three of them can put their heads together. He's been played, he realises, sinking back down into the car, jaw clenched. Low-stakes curiosity and bush league tactics and she still got him talking. 

He wishes they were strangers. He wishes they'd keep their minds on the fucking job instead of always looking backwards, trying to remake the old days, the empty past, buried and gone and not for them to know, and not for him to bear.

::

They squat in an abandoned house outside of Barlow for three nights, which is two nights longer than Dean would have preferred. The girls and Jody make forts in a maze of dusty children's bedrooms upstairs and Alex manages to bag herself a couple of road-shambling bad ones on the first evening, long-range from her window. Ana slaps her on the back and calls her a fucking camper, whatever that means. Dean gives her a nod of approval and leaves them to their laughter and too-sharp eyes, sets himself up downstairs on the couch, in front of the fire and with a view of the door.

By day they trudge around the swamp in the grid pattern Jody ruled out by lantern-light on a map the night before, and on the third morning Dean gets cold enough and dazed enough to make a dumb mistake and almost drowns in shallow stagnant water, bits of plant and fish shit in his mouth and eyes as Sam's face ripples and his long fingers turn webbed and slimy around Dean's neck. He gets off a good but useless punch on its chin that breaks something in his hand, and it bares its teeth and slams his head against a submerged log, flopping him about like a toy. Dean has nothing to grab on to and his vision is swimming and he thinks absently that he might be beaten. It feels expected, kinda understood.

Jody takes off the nixie's head instead and Dean shivers his way back to the car, rinsing his mouth out with his flask, pressing a wad of cloth against the cut at his temple and cursing to himself about having to walk in wet boots. His fucking least favourite thing, walking in wet boots. Hates the heaviness of his feet, hates the looks Jody and the girls keep shooting him. He doesn't think they saw what he saw, but there's slimewater sloshing in his ear and probably leeches on his balls and he has no compunctions about sending them all off in the other car as he squelches his way around the Impala to her trunk. 

How many of his clothes can he ruin in two weeks? He grimaces and carefully peels off his jacket and flannel, grabs an ice-pack for his busted hand. Thank God Jody had a couple of extra towels he can sit on to protect the vinyl. 

He finds the shabbiest gas station in Missouri to donate half his remaining cash to and still gets a gloomy look from the neckbeard behind the counter when he asks for the bathroom key. One of those places with a track worn in the grime and the mirror long gone, which he should probably be grateful for. He runs the water for a long time before he splashes it on his face, rinses his hair and temple, and does his best to change t-shirts without touching anything or hurting his hand too much. 

By dusk he's riding the bad edge of painkillers and exhaustion, thoughts spare and strung out, pulsing in time to the throbbing in his hand, his head. What is he doing. Where is he going. Steering with his wrist balanced on the wheel in front of him, his knuckle swelling ugly. It is as insubstantial as the air around him. It could belong to anyone.

He's slipping like a ghost through a crossroads tumble of buildings that has the nerve to call itself a city when a flock of people pour out of a diner in front of him, and he wakes to the world with a slap of shock and slams on the brakes, nearly fishtailing, only barely avoiding taking a stack of them out like bowling pins. A woman in her sixties thumps the hood with her fist and snarls through the windshield at him, face twisted with fear-born anger, primitive, soul-deep.

No time for the shotgun. Dean grabs his pistol out of the glove box without taking his eyes off the diner. 

It's a kid, the standard Bieber-inspired mid-teen. He's clutching a knife by its blade and there's a fair bit of carnage already. Dean stands in the entrance and watches him slip in the blood on the floor, flail for purchase. He's short and pudgy and all the way blind, too far gone for this to be a rapid turn. Did he stumble in here or did someone bring him in? There's an older couple near him who could be his parents. Dean would spit on them if he felt like getting close enough.

The kid is in motion now, pressing his stomach into the counter and running in place, striping white tracks in the blood at his feet. It's an awkward angle so Dean bangs the grip of his gun against the door a couple of times and the kid changes direction smooth and swift and too far, aiming for a point to Dean's right. Dean drops him with a headshot and a couple to the chest. 

There's another kid heading towards him when he leaves, fucked-up mirror image running at Dean with the whites of his eyes showing. Dean lowers the gun and stops him with a full-body check, sprawls him on the asphalt.

“Don't go in there.”

“They said – they said Paulie –”

“It's done. Don't go in there.”

The kid gapes up at him, uncomprehending, grey cast to his face and searching eyes that could be shock or could be a sign of it getting to him too. Dean's wasting his time. He rubs at his face and takes a knee.

“Look, I'm sorry. You got someone you can go to?”

The kid's done listening and he rolls away from Dean, scrabbles to his feet and stumbles towards the building. Dean stands with a sigh, tucks his gun in his jeans as the screams start, sending ripples through the few that have lingered on the edge of the lot. He can tell from their expressions that this is the first time it's really happened here, that they can't believe what's happening in front of their faces, the stories and the reports and the blackouts and doomsday cries falling on incredulous ears. 

He grabs the elbow of an old guy, an upstanding-citizen type.

“Watch him,” he says, and nods towards the diner, clicks his fingers in front of the guy's face. “Hey, buddy. You understand?”

The guy shakes his head, dazed.

“It happened to Beth's girl but she never...she's not like this. This is….”

“This is how it is,” Dean says, and shakes him, until he looks directly at Dean. “They change. They go. Prepare yourself. _Watch him_. You got it?” 

The guy nods, dumbly, and Dean drops him and heads back to the car.

::

In Kansas City he misses the turnoff for Jody's and sails straight on through with an unconcern like he's flying, no consequences, white noise in his head taking the decision away from him. He parks outside the front door and Nerd #2 answers his hammering, looks Dean up and down with widening eyes and a bloodless face.

“Sam is out,” he stammers, and seems glued to the spot, letting Dean freeze in his t-shirt like a suitor on the landing. He's so fucking tired of dealing with children.

He pushes past eventually, scavenges his room for some of his old clothes and takes them down to the showers. There's still mud in his hair. His muscles finally start to untie in the heat, under the pummelling water pressure, brightening up the sharp sting of his grazes, the white line at his temple that turns the water briefly red. He closes his eyes and maybe even dozes a moment on his feet, thoughts blurring, lingering feeling of loss when he shakes into action and finally turns off the water. 

He takes stock of himself in the mirror, swiping it free of steam every five seconds. Nothing needing stitches in the end but the knuckle he cracked is still hurting like a bitch and without taping it's going to mess with his punch long-term. At least it's on his left hand.

Sam finds him in the first aid room, wrenches the door open, hair wild. Dean looks up from rummaging for antiseptic and tape and can't breathe, caught by the fright in his eyes, the uncertain shape of his mouth. It takes him a second to find his voice.

“You know you could sell tickets to those showers.”

Sam blinks at him in incomprehension and steps into the room, pauses on the other side of the gurney. His hesitation makes Dean's stomach churn. In the swamp Sam had come to him glad and reaching out. 

He bends his head back to his search and feels his ears turn red under Sam's scrutiny.

“You need a hand with that?”

“No,” Dean says, but Sam's already grabbed him, feeling through his knuckles for the broken one, eyes flicking up to catch Dean wince. He keeps light hold of Dean's hand and reaches for the kit, tapes him with a distant professionalism that gives Dean a minute or two of unobstructed gaze. Probably knows it too, offering himself up. 

He drops Dean the moment he's done with the tape and steps back, tosses Dean iodine and butterfly strips for his head. Dean faces the mirror to put them on, feeling foolish with his hand all messed up and Sam's steady gaze on him in the reflection. 

“You look like crap.” 

Dean glares at him and braces himself on the basin underneath the mirror.

“Oh, and you're a prize?”

A muscle twitches in Sam's jaw and Dean sticks on that now, the sharp turns of his face, charcoal brush of stubble. Sometimes Dean blinks and his brother is another few years older, bones stretching out elegant, bulk rising and falling. Shadowed eyes, atrocious hair, broad shoulders, narrow hips. This is what Sam looks like as a man. An unhappy man who lives in a library with a couple of nerds.

“You're staying here tonight,” Sam says. It's not a question. Dean shrugs and they both know he means _yeah_ and in the mirror Sam turns away with relief pure in his face, softening his shoulders.

Dean feels it like a quake. There's forgiveness here if Dean wants it, if he asked for it. Impossible. Insane. Dean knows his brother is messed up, but Jesus. Does he care that little for himself? 

What the hell is he doing here? That was supposed to be the one good thing about how it all went down, giving Sam some space, some safety, that was Dean's new catechism. That was how Dean remade his world as the Darkness infected the land around him, and now he's back staring at the solid weight of his brother's body as he leaves the room, and if he refocusses his eyes he's looking at himself, battered and bewildered, a defenceless paleface wonder with a poor excuse for a soul.

::

He hides in his room and crashes so hard he covers his cheek and pillow in drool, wakes to piss and impose himself briefly on the older nerd when he grabs a bowl of Raisin Bran, and crashes again with it only half-eaten. Whatever chemicals they use to make that stuff healthy gives him crazy dreams: sidling up behind someone as they're standing at a bench in the bunker's garage – Gretchen, thank God it's Gretchen, he's drunk and hooking his chin over her shoulder and looking down at the swell of her breast as she shakes with laughter, lamplight pressing outwards from the wall casting his shadow perfect and regular behind him. She keeps shaking and his shadow is dancing in the swaylight lamp, closer and bigger, bringing the darkness of the room with it, seeping and sliding up his back and around his neck, fingers in his mouth, heavy on his tongue, the strong hand of ruin.

He wakes in a gasping flailing half-panic and here in the bunker it's too much like the old days to bear, the Mark days; not so much wholesale slaughter in these dreams, but they keep coming for him and in these waking pauses they seem to carry the same message the Mark did: blood and desolation. Surrender.

He hangs his head between his knees, breath harsh in his own ears and a shiver of terror fumbling his hand has he gropes for his flask, earth and concrete and tile and book pressing down on him, crushing through the ceiling. He drinks until the burn tamps down the nausea; flexes his busted hand to let the pain clear his head a little.

Half an hour and he sneaks out. Slinks, through the library with its arcana spread across the table and its whiteboard tally glaring. Sam's obsessions tend to make themselves visible. He has a forbidding urge to seek the bowels of the place for this morning's nerd, Tammy, and squeeze her until she swears that they're not up to anything hinky in here. The urge to find Sam in his room is stronger still, to hold him down by blade or barrel or hand until he looks Dean in the eye and makes oaths as binding as time.

He escapes without doing any of these things, shuts the door behind him and listens to the lock mechanism click and slide, a good ten seconds to be fully secure before he can wake the car up and make her bear him along the road and far away.

::

Two whole weeks without a word from the bunker after that, which Dean, if he ever considers it, is glad about. On the downside, no hunts from the bunker either, and all he gets is a couple of one-day forays into the surrounding counties, taking out the odd bad one when one of Jody's contacts calls through.

He spends most of his time alone in the garage or searching vainly for a real hunt. When there's nothing left to do for the cars he slogs through the mud down to the range and sifts the bullet traps. The sand ones are fine but the high-cal three on the end are annoying as hell to work through, inside of his gloves coated in pulverised rubber, digging under his fingernails, probably giving him lung cancer. Jody's got the right idea, recovering this lead, but they need something durable, with a spin chamber, not the half-assed traps he banged together for them. Something like the range at the bunker.

He shuts the trap with an unsteady hand and turns away. Up at the house Jody and Donna are covering over one of the veggie patches with a tarp. Dirt starts flying. Jody elbows Donna hard and Donna's laugh carries clear and merry down the slope and turns into sorrow when it hits him, pressing heavy in his chest, grief out of nowhere, like a raincloud threatening deluge, drowning. 

Pointless. Intolerable. He locks it down, stamps his boots to get some feeling back into his feet and wipes his running nose on his sleeve, and gets back to work.

::

Gretchen shakes him awake in the morning, leaning through the car window, startling him enough that he gives his bad hand a solid bang on the steering wheel. He curses. An empty bottle falls out of his lap and she gives it a dirty look and backs out. It wasn't full when he started on it, he could call after her. He doesn't bother.

The girls finish their chores early and he helps Jody clear the dining room table away, lay down mats. It's been a while since he's checked in on this and they've improved. Claire's been working out, and she's sturdy and quick with the straightstick, beating Alex back into the corner easily. Ana and Jody are working with knives; strong and efficient, Dean notes with approval, but Jody's still got too much cop in her and the moves are defensive, meant to subdue. 

He takes over with Ana and talks her through it. The things they're killing these days, there's no time for anything pretty. If you get close you have to mean it. They don't try to protect their face, or their nuts, or their family. They're dumb as shit, but they don't hold back. They just kill. 

He goes at her a few times and she's fast, faster than him, but her anger always works against her and he gets to her throat, her spine every run, knocks her down hard.

“Dive-bar trucker rules, Ana. Let them get that close and you're dead,” he says. She punches the mat and screams in frustration. “Hey, no crying in baseball. I told you to watch it.”

“Go fuck yourself, Bad Santa,” she snaps, hair flying, teeth bared, and storms out, slamming her knife into the table as she passes. Claire snorts a laugh from somewhere to his left. He doesn't know what to do with that, so he dodges Jody's gaze and leaves himself, slings a rifle over his shoulder and spends the rest of the day hiking the back way through the fields to the property next door. Sweet white weatherboard, two stories, empty. Waste of time. Dead one rotting in the hall, gore-caked fire iron dropped next to it. Dead dog, half-chewed. 

Puts him right off his food and right into another shitty mood, after dinner, washing six hundred dishes with Gretchen because apparently girls will eat their own bodyweight three times in pasta if you let them. 

“So it's definitely not the wiring and I know it's not me. I just can't tell if it's that shitty LNB or if it's Darkness fade,” Gretchen says, and wipes her forehead with her sudsy arm, spares him a harried smile. “That's what Mekhi calls it. I might get him to come out. He said the other day he got Ka-band working but I dunno, they don't get as much rain down there.”

“Who?”

“Mekhi,” she says again, which illuminates things for Dean about as much as it did the first time. “You know, from the bunker. I fucking knew we should have gone with C-band but I'm not pulling all that cable again. Mekhi's been talking to some guy at MIT and –”

“No,” says Dean, numbly. He finishes drying the big pot and puts it on the counter, rests his hands either side.

“Huh?” 

“No.” Dean can't look up from his hands. He's light-headed. “Don't. Don't start that.”

“Start what?”

“I said no.”

She snorts and pulls the plug on the water, starts wiping down the sink. 

“You can say whatever you like, Dean, but I'm gonna do my job.”

“Your _job_?” Dean says. “You think that piece of junk is really gonna make a difference?” He shoves himself off the counter, grabs another beer from the fridge. “For fuck's sake, Gretchen. Open your eyes. This place doesn't need _CNN_ , it needs a _moat_. I don't see you with a shovel in your hands.”

“Oh, buddy.” She laughs, grim and abrupt, throws her dishcloth on the bench and gestures in a way that seems to encompass Dean's drink and Dean both, shakes her head. “Nope. I've done _this_ before. This is done. We're done.”

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Dean says, spreads his arms wide; but she means it, he realises, her lips thin with fury, squaring off with her hands on her hips. He stands there a few beats, foolish, gaping, and her face turns into a sneer, disgust that seems directed more at herself than at him. She shrugs a shoulder like it's all been expected, mutters something he can't make out and elbows past him down the hall.

He watches her leave, dumbfounded, not sure where to go himself. All he has on him are his keys and his phone. What little stuff he has is in her room. 

His feet take him to the porch, for lack of anywhere better. He folds down onto the steps and lets his ass go numb. Welcomes it. Time was he'd just leave, he keeps thinking. It surprises him on some level that he needs somewhere to go to, these days.

It's after midnight when Donna finds him. She sits down, loops her arms around her knees and speaks out into the dark.

“Headin' south tomorrow.”

“That so?”

She nods. “Friend in Myrtle Beach PD gave me a call. Only thing is, I don't know if I'd trust that truck. On such a long drive, ya know.”

Dean takes another swig of his beer, vaguely ashamed, mostly grateful.

“You saying you want a lift?”

“Why?” She asks, and looks at him sideways. “You got a car?”

::

“Nightsickness,” pronounces the morgue attendant, holding up the sheet. It's pretty unpleasant under there, but that's mostly the sea-life, Dean figures. Donna darts a look at him and shakes her head minutely and Dean's brain finally catches up to his hearing.

“Hold up, night _what_?”

“That's what they're calling it,” the guy says, and drops the sheet back down, wipes his hands on his lab coat, nose wrinkled in distaste. 

“Who's _they_?”

Donna rests a hand on Dean's chest and steps smoothly in front of him.

“Malcolm, right?” She says, breaking out her grin. “Think I could get a copy of that tox report? Thanks, Mal, we owe ya one. Okay? Okay.” 

The guy glares at her but turns away, drags his feet over to the computer, and she pivots back to Dean, smile dropping, eyes widening. She nods towards the corpse.

“Now,” she says carefully, “my expertise is mainly limited to the Great Lakes region, you know, but I can't think of any fish that do the –” She breaks off and mimes stabbing two fingers into her neck. 

Dean purses his lips and lifts the sheets on the other three bodies. Swollen and piebald and degraded, but featuring the same bites, all upper torso: neck, breast, soft underside of the arm where it joins the pit. Four dead bodies plus seven missing, all drunk, mostly fitting the solo tourist profile, taken from a couple of nice hotels downtown and, more regularly, from a run of grubby motels on the wrong side of the airport. Out by themselves, looking for a good time in a miserable world. They never had a chance.

“Jesus. I gotta move away from the beach.” The attendant appears next to Dean, disgust ugly on his face. “It's like they're not even people anymore.” 

Dean drops the sheet and plucks the report from the guy's fingers.

“Might wanna get these guys back in the fridge, _Mal_ ,” he says, and leans in and sniffs him, curls his lip. “They're starting to smell like your cologne.” 

He bangs out of there, Donna apologising behind him. Waste of breath. They're never gonna see the douche again. Dean's never coming back, that's for sure. The place is depressing in the off season, looking faker and more rundown without the sun; it's been overcast since they arrived, Old Glory flapping half-heartedly every other corner and mostly-empty resort towers hovering over his shoulders like vultures. No one on the street seems to know what to do with themselves. The Skywheel's not running today and it looks like it's on loan from a condemned county fair.

Donna provides a very sunny, very chatty contrast, checking them into the next motel on from the last disappearance with such charm that she bags them twenty dollars of minibar credit. 

“Knew I brought you for a reason,” Dean grins at her as they leave the office, and halts mid-stride to make way for a biker couple, the chick lifting her sunglasses to cruise Dean blatantly. She winks at him and he gives her the nod.

“You dog!” Donna knocks him with her elbow as he watches the chick sway around the corner. Her dude slips his hand into the back pocket of her jeans. Dean shakes his head.

“Vetalas,” he mutters to Donna, as they head down to the room. “That error on the tox report's not an error. But these things usually kill in runs of five or so. What was this? Ten? Maybe more?”

“Well,” says Donna, after a pause. “Maybe they figured a few extra bodies aren't too suspicious nowadays.”

Dean folds that idea inside himself and sets his mind on giving her the lowdown on vetalas, checking over his silver knives. Donna calls back to base, and they spend the rest of the evening bumming around, emptying the minibar of bourbon and watching TV. _The Bold and The Beautiful_ has a storyline about one of its square-jawed heroes turning bad. He catches it from a bite, like it's transmittable, an STD or lycanthropy or something, and dies chained to a hospital bed with his tears stained red and his assortment of lovers weeping their farewells. Donna turns it off in contempt as he's slipping peacefully away. 

Around ten Dean goes for ice. He takes the long way back and the biker chick meets him halfway, blocks his path in a nice little isolated part of the parking lot. She runs a hand through her hair and cocks her hips. 

“Hey there, handsome,” she says. Her lipstick looks black in the overhead lights. “You partying tonight? Want some company?”

“Sorry sister,” Dean says, and takes a step backwards, pulls his knife out of the bucket. He flips it in his hand, and her eyes gleam at the shine of the blade. “I don't date fangs.”

“Oh, darlin',” she says, and grins wide and toothy. “This ain't a date.”

She grabs for him but he throws the bucket into her face, ducks away while she swipes at it and does a header into the dude, nearly knocks himself out. He flails a little and ends up on his ass and there's the sound of a body hitting a dumpster off to the side – fucking Donna's here, going for her and he's stuck dealing with this asshole, wider and stronger than Dean had thought from his glimpse earlier. He sneers and advances and Dean has to scoot backwards across the asphalt, skin ripping off his palms until he can get his feet under him, throw his knife underhand from a crouch.

It's a bad throw, buried in the soft of the guy's stomach. He launches himself after it, punches him on the jaw to keep him reeling, pulls the knife out and stabs it home and ends up going down a second time when the guy kicks Dean's feet out in his death throes.

There's a scream behind him, rage and pain, cut off the instant it starts and he rolls to see Donna stab the chick a couple more times, face a blood-spray mask of concentration. 

“I think you got it,” Dean says, between heaving breaths, and Donna steps back, lets the body fall to the ground and wipes her wrist across her forehead, leaving a streak of red behind. She looks down at Dean and the guy, side by side on their backs. It hasn't been Dean's most elegant or dignified kill, he has to admit. 

“Well,” she says brightly, holding out her hand. “Need a push?”

::

Dean brushes the gravel off his ass and Donna wipes herself down and they head inland to dump the bodies in the river. They watch the bundles sink in the thick still water, falling sluggishly out of the glow of the headlights, bats peeping mournfully overhead like distant cousins at a funeral.

Donna reties her hair, blows out a sigh through pursed lips and pulls a couple of minibar bottles of booze out of her pocket.

“To my first vetala,” she says, and Dean echoes her, cracks the lid. His baby's headlights just skim the opposite bank, the trees leaning out over the water. Everything is in black and white.

“ _Nightsickness_ ,” he mutters. “Sounds like a bad horror movie.”

She shrugs, shadowed movement in the corner of his eye.

“I guess they gotta give it some kinda name,” she says, and shivers, ducks her chin into her scarf. She's so much shorter than him. She doesn't belong here. She doesn't need to become this.

He finishes the bottle and looks at her.

“Is this really what you want to do, Donna?”

“Yeah,” she says, after a moment, still staring forwards. “Knowing what I know now. How could I live with myself?”

He lets the question die between them. He's not supposed to answer and he couldn't anyway, throat tight and sore with the thought of the life getting a hold of her, sucking her spark away surely as a djinn.

He swallows hard.

“You got any more of those?”

She shifts her hands in her pockets and he hears bottles rattle and clink.

“I'll trade ya,” she says, and grins. “You can have the lot if you take me to a bar.”

“You don't want to drink with me?” He says, puts an offended hand to his chest, and she gives him a scornful look.

“As if I could keep up. Anyhoo, I'm looking for company and no offence, but have you seen yourself?”

“You know what they say, ugly on the outside, pretty on the inside.” 

“You can't help it, I know,” she says, and claps him on the shoulder, bends down to grab the leftover rope and plastic. “Come on, Merrick, let's get this show on the road. I'm freezing my ta-tas off out here.”

He drops her at a locals' bar off the highway and means to turn around for the motel but gets out the car instead, finishes the bottles and starts on his flask as he meanders his way past empty trailers and cabins, wandering long enough to make it to the boulevard. Too many blank windows, for-lease signs. A company town, built for one thing. If the place doesn't pick up once the weather turns it's doomed. 

There's nowhere to go but the edge of the world. The wind off the ocean is freezing and he shrugs his jacket closer around him. There's a sickle sliver of the moon like a lopsided smile that seems to hang dead centre of every other street he walks down. He follows it out to the sand, where it sits lower than seems possible over the water, and settles himself in the dunes.

::

He's so cold that even drunk he drowses more than sleeps, and the sun glowing through his eyelids as it rises brings him even closer to the surface so he hears Donna hurrying down the beach before she gets to him. She's calling his name and something else that gets him on his feet before it really registers what it is.

Sam's missing. 

She fills him in on the way to the car. Call came through to Jody's place this morning. Three nights now. Gone, no notice, no word, no response to calls. The junker out of the garage is missing too, an old stolen Explorer, which is the only thing that keeps Dean sane, Sam leaving willingly, on the run. 

“You're gonna have to call one of the girls to come and pick you up,” he says back at the motel, stuffing his shit into his bag. 

“What?” She says. “You don't want my help?”

“Donna, I – if something's gone wrong.” Dean halts at the taste of bile in his mouth. He doesn't have the time to explain this. If something's gone wrong he doesn't want anyone around him. He looks at her helplessly and doesn't know what to say. 

Her face is twisted in worry and disappointment, but she fixes him something strong and black to go. He's maybe still too drunk to drive. He points the car towards the Pacific and drives anyway.

The nerds text him the location of Sam's cell every few hours. It's been moving around a lot the last couple of days; went west first, then north, a big swoop south. Dean doesn't get it. It looks like he's trying to lose someone; or someone's trying to be lost. 

He crosses the Mississippi ten hours after starting out, risking the Greenville bridge with its embedded lookouts. He wishes them all to hell as he passes under their eyes. Couldn't make himself look innocent even if he wanted to, but they must be blind themselves today, and he doesn't pick up a bullet or a tail. 

_Dallas_ , his cell chirps, and he takes the first left he can. What the hell's in Dallas, Christ. If someone's got Sam. If he's trying to shake someone by himself – he shouldn't be by himself, why would he leave the bunker, it's supposed to be safe for him there now Dean's gone, Dean's ruined it, he pulled the trigger in that kitchen and it's just taken four months for the bullet to hit, he's fucking _ruined it_ – 

He hauls the car onto the shoulder and waits until the nausea passes. His hands are shaking. He's so fucked. He never meant this. He never meant this. He'll pay forever for what he is and with a smile on his face, but that fate's his, that belongs to him, not his brother. There's no one in even this grim and merciless world who could look Dean in the eye and say otherwise, and if they tried they wouldn't be trying for long.

::

Sam is in goddamned Oklahoma of his own goddamned volition, in a town with a name like a shitty hair metal band, main road ribboned in black and pickups parked diagonal. On top of the hardware store is a tower that Sam's cell has been pinging for the last two hours.

It's dark, and pouring. Dean cruises the surrounding streets until he spots a bar with a cowgirl painted on the sign, her face distorted in a cheesy wink and a pair of light-up Halloween devil horns glued somehow to her head and he knows, he can see Sam's head turning at that like he was there himself. 

Dean could wring his fucking neck.

He parks next to the Explorer and leans forward to rest his forehead on the wheel. He spends several minutes listening to rain pounding the windshield like a blanket before he pushes back, texts Donna with another apology, and gets out. 

The place is pretty dingy and has carried the cowgirl theme inside, rope glued around the edge of every table, cowhide nailed to the walls. Sam is bent zigzag at the bar, feet perched on the footrest of the stool. In his shirtsleeves, blues and browns blending into the wood. There are four empty glasses at his elbow. Seems the staff at the All Night Roundup ain't for shit.

Dean sits next to him and signals for a beer. Sam's double-take is the only satisfying thing that's happened to Dean in his entire lifetime. He gapes while Dean tells the bartender to keep them coming. 

He drains half his glass in the first pull. His body's still in panic mode and he refuses to look at his brother, digs his thumbnail under the soggy varnish of the bar.

Sam reaches a hand up and Dean flinches, just barely, as Sam ruffles his hair, rubs his fingers together.

“Did you… sleep in a sandpit?”

He hasn't slept in four months, he feels like snapping, and whose fault is that. Instead he finishes his drink and keeps his eyes forward. Good, bad and ugly whiskey tiered up on the mirrored shelves. He wonders if they'll let him have a bottle.

“I was at the beach, actually,” he says. “Knee deep in bikini babes and then what, oh Sam's missing, oh, we can't find him, where is he, wah wah wah. You owe me, dude.”

“I'm not _missing_ ,” Sam says. “I just went for a drive.”

Dean feels his jaw clench.

“You didn't think to tell anyone?”

“No,” Sam says, a little mystified, and Dean can tell that he really didn't think anyone would miss him. “I left a note. No one called me.”

“Fuck you, _I_ called you.”

“Sorry man.” He shrugs. “It didn't get through. You know what it's like.”

Dean shakes his head in disbelief, swings on his stool to face him. 

“What the hell have you been doing?”

Sam's mouth twists. He runs his hand through his hair and his voice is careful and even.

“Sometimes I just gotta get out of there, you know? See the world I created.” 

“Jesus,” Dean says, appalled, and Sam spares him a brief dark glance. There's something dire about him, in the hollows of his cheeks, the way he won't let go of his glass, that sends up warning signals in Dean. Sam, drunk and guilty and buried in his thoughts. It has not been a good combination for them.

“I can't be sorry I got you back. Or.” Sam barks a laugh, sharp and bitter, and takes a pull of his beer. “Whatever. Got rid of the Mark. I can't be sorry. I won't be. But I dunno, man. This wasn't the price I expected to pay.”

He and Sam weren't the ones to pay it, Dean considers pointing out. And anyway, Sam's paid enough. 

“Sam,” he says instead, gently, and his brother sighs, perilous light in his eyes dulling a little, neck bending in exhaustion.

“Every step forward we take, it's like – it's like I keep falling down a well. Nothing is right. Nothing works anymore. And it's been so long--” His voice breaks and he turns his head away from Dean. Dean can see his throat working. “I guess I just keep wondering what's gonna come next.”

Dean stares at him a while. What kind of talk is this? You don't have to know the kind to know the degree of what's coming next. It's bad. It's always bad. He shakes his head again and stands, pats his pockets for his keys.

“Come on. I'm gonna take you back to your nerds.”

It's the wrong thing to say. Sam's temper flares.

“Have a goddamn drink with me Dean.”

Dean widens his eyes and makes a _jeez, okay_ face and feels a little dawning thrill at the twitch of his brother's lips, trying to disguise amusement. He sits back down and signals again, and they're side-by-side like that a while, and he breathes, and calms, and feels Sam relax slowly next to him amidst the clink and chatter. Someone keeps putting Christian rock on the jukebox. 

Okla-fucking-homa. 

“They're debating raising the taxes on booze,” Sam says, out of nowhere.

“Huh?”

“Booze. Reliable source of revenue in these trying times.” Sam gives him a wry glance.

“Aren't enough blind psychos around already, the government's gonna add backwoods moonshine to the mix?”

It's meant to be a joke but Sam's newborn humour turns sour. Dean watches him shred a beer-stained coaster and kicks himself, drains the rest of his glass and knocks his shoulder to Sam's.

“You see that barbecue joint down the block?”

Sam looks up at him with a sudden dangerous shine that makes Dean giddy, and he blinks and he's drunk in a different, even shittier bar and Sam is eating ribs and talking about that time he was in middle school when Dean made them pancakes with bad eggs and they'd spent the night spewing. He's smiling at Dean like nothing at all has happened to them since they were twelve and sixteen and Dean forgets his way into a feeling of companionship so deep and pure it comes right from the core of him, pushing that old blood around, his whole self turned towards his brother.

Maybe because the place reminds him or his brother's elbow by his own, but for some reason he thinks about that night the week after Sam's twentieth, when he went down to Stanford and gave Sam two hundred bucks and they spent most of it at some bar in town, as far away from the student hangouts as they could get. A good night, hard as it was to hear all about Sam's awesome new life, the family law prof who looked like Richard Belzer and the hilarious friend Brady who rushed freshmen stupid enough to believe he was in a secret fraternity, and the hot girl in classics with the amazing hair and adorable moles. 

That shit had sat heavy in Dean's stomach, but the night was sweeter than he could have imagined, Sam actually happy to see his fuckup older brother, old jokes and new ones, and then there was the hilarity of Sam as drunk as Dean'd ever seen him, head thrown back in laughter, reeling back arm-in-arm to his dorm; Sam collapsing on his bed and nearly pulling Dean down too, long fingers around his wrist when Dean stood to get him some water, low voice aching in the dark, _Dean please_ , curling up Dean's spine; _yeah, Sammy_ , he'd said, and when he came back with a glass Sam was dead to the world and Dean had set it next to his dangling fingers and passed out on the couch.

“You remember, Dean?” Sam prompts, and grins at him, cheeks and fingers sticky with sauce, and Dean nods dumbly. What his brother's done to him, his heart too small for this feeling, ribs too tight and sore. There's no bottom to this, no end. It's not fair. He could be made new a hundred times in a hundred different places and still not be beyond the hold Sam has on him. He could stay away a hundred years and it wouldn't change a thing.

::

Sam leaves the Ford behind. There's not even a question of it, a certainty that Dean was taking him home that makes Dean dizzy.

He keeps to the interstate and the speed limit. No point pretending. They cross the Kansas state line and pass the turnoff for Wellington in the space of what feels like seconds. Wichita looms on the horizon like expected bad news. 

Sam is looking out the front, has his arm hooked over the back of the seat, big hand hovering near Dean's shoulder. Dean can almost feel the weight of it.

“Is that one?”

Dean squints. The guy is stumbling across a field about a hundred yards away, two people in camouflage gear trotting after him. 

“Probably.”

Sam's head turns as they pass. He flinches, but Dean doesn't hear anything over the engine. A semi coming towards them beeps twice, brightly, gleefully.

Sam seems to shrink, bends forward to pull out his laptop. Dean swallows and keeps the needle on 70, sails them right over the top of Wichita.

“Hey, Dean? You got a hunt after this?”

“Always something that needs killing.”

Sam looks at him like it's a goddamn tragedy, face broken and open like when he saw what happened to Charlie, and like he's been primed for it it triggers memories in Dean that he would rather not make themselves felt, kicking madly up from where they've been buried. That night, taking care of her body. He'd been out of his mind. Or too much in it. He should never have been there, should have taken himself away – to have put his hands on his brother like that. 

He blanches, sick, and wipes a hand over his face, skinned palms still tender. It was the Mark, it was the Mark. It could never happen again.

Sam clears his throat and turns back to the front.

“Can we swing by Princeton? I wanna check something out.”

The mile markers blipping by, that's what Dean's focussing on, and it takes him a second to process Sam's words.

“ _Swing by_?” He scoffs, but starts running the roads in his head. Straight line through via Route 60 but last he heard a good chunk of land around Springfield was worth skipping and he's thinking he oughta turn right around and go south to the 40, miles on miles, hours on hours on top of the two-day stretch to Jersey. Maybe a whole extra night if they don't push it.

“Yeah – if that's okay. I found a book in one of the archive rooms that refers to a manuscript --” 

Dean lets him run his mouth and finds a place to turn. He swings the visor around to cover the spinning sun, and sets his eyes on the new road.

::

The library looks more like a castle than anything. It probably has dungeons. Dean eyes it sceptically through the windshield and takes another bite of his bacon-and-egg sandwich, trying to figure out how much longer Sam might take to find whatever it is he's looking for in there. Hell, he's probably found it and is just walking around jacking off to all the books. Dean'll need to go in there with a pack of wild horses to drag him out.

There are too many people around and it's riding his nerves, kids flitting past in shutter speed. A librarian type walks past and gives his baby a snooty once-over. Dean shoots her the finger and watches her scurry. He's already chased away three like her with his police badge. Technically, he supposes, he's not _legally_ parked, but the spot marked Deputy University Librarian was the only free one close to the building.

The morning brightens up and the kids start brightening too, getting louder, more caffeinated. He yawns and stretches, takes a couple of turns around the car to wake himself up, props himself against the hood and has a drink; spots Sam, finally, heading towards him. 

Sam's wearing his professor costume, thick woollen cardigan over a shirt and slacks. They'd stopped purposefully for it yesterday at a thrift store in the 'burbs. He looks ridiculous. How could it fool anyone? Dean's brother is tall as the sky and has the balance of a bare-knuckle fighter. Dean's brother has battled angels and demons and won. He's unmistakable.

Sam pulls a bag out of his pocket and tosses it over. Dean grabs it out of the air. M&Ms, vending machine size. He has a handful in his mouth before Sam even makes it to the car, jerks his thumb towards the car door behind him.

“Get inside; I don't want to be seen with you, looking like that.”

Sam rolls his eyes and perches next to him, pulls his laptop out of his bag and props his heel on the bumper so he can rest it on his knee. Dean frowns.

“Where's the book?”

“You can't _borrow_ that kind of thing, Dean,” Sam says, in his _you're a dumbass_ voice, opening his laptop. “I had to get scans. Gimme a sec, I wanna use their wifi.”

“Oooooh, he had to get scaaaans,” Dean mocks, and doesn't get a response. He takes another drink, looks around. “Busy here.”

“There's a lot of money in physics and climate science these days,” Sam says, face blank, tapping away. Dean doesn't believe his disinterest. “Not to mention psychology.” 

Dean snorts.

“So now it can happen to anyone they're finally not ignoring it, huh?”

“Hard to ignore a week without a sunrise and people going nuts for no reason,” Sam says, and leans closer to the screen. A yellow manuscript is loading in chunks, some kinda writing Dean has no idea about thatching its way across.

“They're civilians. They're not made for it. They should leave it the hell alone before it gets them hurt.”

“This is bigger than us, Dean.”

“Oh yeah? You let the librarian in on your little crusade?” He says, and Sam lifts his head and fixes Dean with a piercing look.

“It's not your crusade too?”

Dean shakes his head and pushes himself off the hood. No point trying to make Sam understand. He's the one out here, dealing with it. Piece by piece, psycho by psycho. He's done with crusades. 

He has his hand on the door handle when Sam speaks again, frustrated and insistent. It's how he sounds when he's trying to convince himself, and Dean's heart sinks to hear it.

“There's a fix, Dean. If we could just... There has to be a, a _rule_. A _method_. Not everyone who turns goes bad. Is it corrupting the good? Is it sentient? Is it choosing people based on who they really are? Inside?”

Dean sighs. 

“It's not hard, Sam. The Darkness gets in them, they go cuckoo, they kill their kids, the end.”

“But the numbers –”

“I don't think the stats tell the full story on that one.”

“There are support groups _on this campus_ for people who've gone blind but not crazy, Dean,” Sam flares. “There are signs everywhere, why don't you open your eyes?”

He shakes his head and doesn't answer, settles behind the wheel and waits for Sam to finish. Dean sees clearly enough. That's the whole problem right there. He tips the rest of the candy in his mouth and makes sure to drop the bag out the window as they pass through the gates.

::

That night they find a barn and set themselves back up on the hood and drink down the quarter moon. They'd crossed a solid chunk of the country over the afternoon and Dean's feeling good, had passed some of that time thinking about doing it again, maybe, if Sam needed another ride, needed something else killed. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all, if the bunker people came up to the farmhouse every now and then.

“Hey,” says Sam, after a long silence, easy curiosity in his voice. “When did you break your nose?”

Dean raises his eyebrows. 

“Couple'a months ago. Bad one clipped me. That noticeable?”

“Not really,” Sam says, like it's nothing that he can tell. It twists warm and pleased in Dean's gut and he takes a drink to calm it, hands the bottle over.

“Remember the first time?”

Sam pauses with the bottle half-raised, mouth slack in thought. 

“That sprite in Yosemite?”

“Man, she kicked my ass.”

Sam grins, shakes his head, takes a drink and licks his lips.

“What possessed you?”

“You don't remember?”

“I was with Dad.”

“No, you were – she was going for ya. Dad was dealing with her buddy.”

“Oh.” Sam seems put out by this and it bugs at Dean's good mood. Like it's some kind of surprise by now? That's how they've always rolled.

Sam lapses back into silence, obviously still in the past: Dean plucks the bottle out of his hand and he doesn't even notice. They are down a six pack now and most of a bottle of cheap tequila, all that the gas station had left that Dean was willing to countenance. It was only barely drinkable when they started on it and it hasn't much improved. Would be better if they had salt and lime, could make a night of it – but no, he imagines Sam with salt on his tongue and sticky with juice, and his heart hammers painfully. Best to keep it simple. He takes another drink and grimaces, eyes squeezed shut. 

Sam's voice again, abrupt.

“What happened that time you broke your wrist in Tampa? Dad ordered me not to ask.”

Dean opens his eyes and frowns at him. 

“He ordered you?”

Sam nods.

“It was only a fracture,” Dean says, baffled, trying to get ahead of wherever this conversation is going. Sam waits for him to continue; sighs when he doesn't, and makes a move to get up. “No, it was just some dickbag at the motel. I jumped a wall to get away, landed bad. Dad took care of him.”

“You were _fourteen_ ,” Sam says, like Dean doesn't remember being too small and shut in a corner with brick at his back. Why the fuck is Sam bringing this up? The past always presses in too sour, turns bad. Why can't they have just one good night? “You think Dad--”

“I don't--” he starts, louder than he meant, and tries again. “I don't wanna talk about him, Sam.”

Sam nods. “Sorry.”

“It's cool.”

Dean shuffles up a little, lies back on the windshield, fits his boot heel against the up-curve of the hood so his leg stays put. Sam stays sitting up front, dim solid shape with his head tipped to the sky. Fields stretching out to either side. Dean's not watching them too closely. There's a lot of country here in the Illinois boonies, but open room is generally safer, and anyway. He's got Sam to watch his back. Or he's watching Sam's back. Whichever. Either way, both ways. The way it's meant to be.

“Maybe it's about chaos then,” Sam says meditatively, as though there was no gap between Princeton and here. Dean doesn't have the energy to be annoyed by this revisit. He's been half expecting it. Sam's too smart. He picks at this stuff until he's satisfied. “Think about it.”

“Okay, I'm thinking.”

Sam reaches back without looking and Dean settles the tequila in his hand. 

“Who hated the Darkness? God and the angels, with all their commands and laws,” Sam says, and drinks. “Chaos is the thing they can't stand. Free will.”

He turns his head a fraction, shows Dean the point of his nose, the corner of his eye. It takes a moment for Dean to realise he's expected to reply.

“So? They're just dickbags.”

Sam shakes his head like Dean is a lost cause and passes the bottle back, returns to the stars.

“Did you know that strokes increase when there's a coronal mass ejection?”

“A mass coronary what?”

Sam pretends to ignore him and leans back to rest his shoulders against the windshield without even hitching himself up, his head even with Dean's waist. Not many people long enough to do that, Dean thinks, a little mesmerised by the stretch of him, the smile he's trying to hide.

“I need an astrophysicist,” he says, and Dean snorts.

“Said the nun to the priest.”

“That doesn't even make sense, Dean,” Sam says, and tips his head up to grin wide and upside down at him, teeth gleaming, so close, and Dean's eyes feel huge, something very serious crushing his chest. 

He sits up quickly and his head spins. He points towards the barn.

“I'm gonna.” His tongue is thick and useless and he thrusts the bottle at Sam and falls very gracefully off the car. Sam waves his hands in a shooing gesture and he's still smiling, Dean shouldn't be able to see it so well in this light when he can't look straight at his brother anyway.

He wakes at some point after that. The barn never got enough sun to retain heat and even with a good layer of dusty straw under him he's curled around himself like a pill bug, teeth chattering. He's still not steady on his feet but he makes it to the car to fish out another blanket, kicks Sam until he stops snoring and finds a softish spot next to him, hungry for the warmth he radiates.

He wakes a second time, on his back in the thin silver light of predawn. That's the first thing he registers, the dependable dawn, and he's flushed with heart-tripping gratitude, too big for his body, good and sleepy and perfect. He's most of the way to hard, and Sam has him pinned, his hand an anchoring weight above Dean's heart.

It's dim in a healthy right way and warm. He is still comfortably boozy and his mouth is dry and his head is warning that it's gonna hurt when he's upright so he puts his hand on his dick and pulls a little through his jeans, a tingling, pleasant pressure. He closes his eyes and makes a conscious effort to sink back down into that cozy dreamwake, keep it blurry and soft. The day is here. His brother is here. It's a good morning.

Sam is asleep and his hand doesn't move except to rise and fall with Dean's breath, trapping his right arm, and Dean's left hand feels like a stranger's. Or maybe someone else's as he slips through fly and boxers and jerks himself slow and easy, blanket rough on the back of his knuckles, cheap blanket that covers them both, a dark little cocoon. He's kept his brother warm. He breathes through his nose and twists his grip a little and keeps it small and quiet. Careful, careful. 

They could be dozy and moving like an after-lunch drive, sun on his face and arm and his eyes trying to close. Maybe Sam reaching over to take care of him, put him all the way to sleep, hair bashful over his eyes. Early days. Dean swipes a thumb over the head of his dick and slides it down and thinks about how they could be under a heavy quilt in the only room left at the motel, crammed into a double with Sam's arms and legs all over him.

Outside the birds are starting to go mad. Months now and they still treat the dawn like a miracle.

He jerks faster, angle awkward, and wishes he had his other hand to make it better, smooth over his balls, that's what he likes but Sam is effectively trapping him. It starts to come on, working through his thighs, sparking behind his eyes. He licks his lips and feels Sam's fingers dig into his chest a little. His breath is harsh off to Dean's right and Dean thinks he might feel the puff of it on his cheek and his brother is locked down so tight Dean thinks he can feel that too, vibrating from him in dark iron waves and he might do it, he might shift and put his hand where Dean needs it. It would be so good.

But he doesn't. He doesn't do anything. Dean goes a little rougher and tries to end it already, foreboding starting to wake in him. Bad idea, stupid. Stupid. He thinks about fucking a woman, getting deep with her heels digging into the backs of his thighs. It helps. Sam under him, in the kitchen, and his breath catches with the things he could do, choking with need. Christ, he wants it. Sammy. 

He comes and it's not great, in the regret stage before he even finishes, hoping the blanket is catching most of it. He wishes he were drunker. He wishes he'd never fucking woken up.

His stomach lurches. This is the hangover talking now, bile taste at the back of his throat and he blinks and groans in disgust; Sam scrabbles beside him and explodes up, pushing him deep into the dirt. He flees, and Dean catches the light blazing around his form in the doorway before he closes his eyes again.

::

It's an easy drive back to the bunker for all the effort it takes to not pull the car off the road and end things there. On the way out through the fields they pass a church and Dean eyes the gathered rows of cars and slows down.

“Don't leave me here,” Sam says, tonelessly, without even looking at him, and Dean speeds up again and gets them on the highway, mostly gets away with pre-verbal communication after that and Sam doesn't try too hard either, leaving Dean to freak out in peace. A black wild monster is battering at him; deafening, absolute panic. It feels like the end of the world and then he thinks about how it could have been even worse, how close he'd been to rolling over and – he might have done anything, he might have let it out, lost it completely, he has no fucking clue anymore what he's capable of. Never in a million years imagined he could get this delusional. Did he think he could just be around Sam with no consequences? He was done for the instant he stepped inside that shitty bar in Oklahoma. 

Well, that whole fucking state is dead to him now.

He drops Sam outside the bunker entrance and guns it, and then can't help a last-minute glance in the rear view just before he turns the corner. He's moving too fast and all he sees is a confusion of green-brown, only the grey road steady. There's a splash of red, Sam's shirt. That's it.

So that's it.

::

The farmhouse makes his skin crawl, people like cockroaches, everywhere he turns. Claire and Alex in front of the TV gaping up at him wide-eyed and gormless. Ana out on the range and Donna cleaning guns in the dining room. He passed Gretchen and Jody on the way in as they were heading to the shed and if he said anything to them he has no idea what it was. He suspects it wasn't good. He thinks Gretchen might have told him to take a long walk off a short pier.

This place is too small. What was Jody thinking, a fucking five-bedroom farmhouse? How can they live like this? Overstuffed couches and frilly lamps and big wooden dressers. It smells like someone threw up potpourri in every corner. 

He sucks down a glass of water and upends the bathroom, linen closet, the kitchen, looking for aspirin. His head is a mess and he's got a low-level tremor fucking with him and someone's decided to move the kit, which defeats the entire purpose of having one, but whatever. That's fine. He can get some more. There's a grocery list stuck to the fridge and he snatches at it.

The store is on the edge of town and empty when he gets there. He knocks a few boxes of Panadol off the shelves and tosses in their requests and sighs internally when he sees the Chatty Cathy behind the register.

“Well hey there, Deano,” he says, big jovial smile spread across his mug; one of those types who doesn't know what kind of story he's living, who never got the message about the post-apocalyptic wasteland they're in. Dean hates him. “How's she running?”

“Smooth as silk,” he mutters.

“You hear about Senator Callahan's husband?”

“Nope.”

Leon makes a big _ookaaayy_ face, bends down and grabs a bottle of Jim from under the counter, bags it with the rest of the groceries. Dean can't believe what he's seeing. 

“Did I ask for that?”

“What? No, but--”

“Don't _assume_ , Leon, you know what that makes you.”

Leon returns the bottle and takes Dean's cash with an injured glare. 

Screw him.

In the car he pops the tablets with the last drops of some old Gatorade and tries to get a hold of himself over the half-hour run back. He's being an asshole, it's no sweet mystery. He's just. He's just. This isn't something he's made to be able to just cope with.

Twice now he would have fucked his little brother if he'd had the chance. Past time he accept it's not gonna go away. Past time he face up to what he is.

At least he didn't hit Sam this time, he thinks, and tucks that cold comfort away into the rotten core of himself.

::

Back at the farmhouse he dumps the groceries in the kitchen and takes another searching walk around the place, along the perimeter fence, letting his feet freeze into lead. He finishes at the woodpile, and Jody comes for him at twilight. He hadn't even noticed, the day turning so slowly.

She folds her arms and stares at him a while. Dean keeps his head down, keeps clearing himself out.

“Remind me to never get on Gretchen's bad side,” she says eventually. He grunts, and swings poorly, shaves a cheap little splinter off the log. He grits his teeth at the interrupted rhythm and tries not to aim his mood at her.

“Dinner's up.”

To be in there with them all, laughing, squabbling over the gravy.

“I'm not hungry.”

She puts her hands on her hips.

“What are you doing?”

Good question. He splits the log, buries the axe in the stump and brushes himself down, kicks the wood in the direction of the pile. He darts a glance at her, looks away to the encroaching night.

“I'm gonna. I've gotta head out. I checked the fence. You've got the wood.” It sounds dumb and inadequate. “I gotta go.”

“Where?”

Dean rubs at his face, his headache making itself felt again. Why did he leave that fucking bottle at the store? It's not like it was tequila. 

“This is a joke, Jody,” he says, and winces at the plea in his own voice. “You have to see that. I'm a – I'm a hunter. I can't be here.”

He expects her to go for reassurance or bring up Gretchen but she's just watching him. She's too sharp. He can't stand being under her eyes, and he turns towards the house.

“You think that's what Bobby would want?” She calls after him, and it jolts him into a welcome anger. How dare she. When has Dean ever been what Bobby would want? 

He spins, stepping backwards, swings his arms out, palms up.

“They're all dead, Jody,” he calls, bitter, and she flinches in the fading light. “What does it matter?”

::

In a bar across the Nebraska border he hears a rumour about a town that lost its whole population, and heads west to check it out. One of those bends in the road that got itself a couple of extra streets, a weedy baseball diamond and a name; a school that serves farm kids and kids from the next few bends in the road. In summer the road and the fields alike would be red and burned.

The houses and trailers are painted white and all twenty or so of them are empty. On the side of the school gym in stringy red capitals he reads _MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN_ and inside he kills five locked-away crazies. Headshots, mainly. It gets bloody at the finish.

The last two rush him and he gets one but ends up in closework with the other, a grappling scuffle that has him pushing the guy face-first into the squeaking floor, lanky, long hair. Of course, his brain sighs. Of course, of course, this is your life. 

“Fucking settle,” Dean grunts, and straddles him, all his weight through the point of his elbow keeping the guy's torso down while he struggles to reload. It's awkward and all he can smell is gore and the rancid stink of a person gone a few days bad, person no more, pushing a nothing thing against the ground as it heaves into his body, blood in the air, in his nostrils, and there's some kind of sense-memory thing that happens where he's in the kitchen with Sam bent over the table in front of him, his own pitiless hand on the back of Sam's neck, Sam's face smearing into the wood, his breath ghosting along the surface and nothing tying Dean to the earth but his searing arousal and the wild pulverising fury that's taken hold of him. His rage and his brother, and all the rest of the world could hang.

His joints collapse and the thing thrashes free, throwing him backwards. His head bounces twice on the wood and his vision explodes in stars and dissolves him for a good few seconds.

This one wants to use its hands and that's what saves him, the personal touch. It's already scraped away all its fingernails but he's still scared for his belly, kicking out as it tears at his shirt. He grabs its hair and puts the gun to its temple and shoots, bad angle that just creases the thing's skull, opening more veins. A whole chunk of scalp and hair comes away in his hand.

Second shot does it, and then he says hello again to his lunch, and then he lurches out of there, head spinning, stumbles down the block until he gets to a house. Like most places at the end of a long string of power lines this town is still off the grid. At least the cold shower gives his legs an excuse to shake. 

There are no clothes in the closet in the master bedroom and the mantelpiece is empty of photographs. He'd bet every mantelpiece in the town is. There were more bodies in that gym than he can answer for, more than could possibly have gone bad in a place this size. What the fuck were these people thinking? Had they just rounded up any one of their friends or family who ever gave them a weird look and then fled? Had it been so impossible to tell? There must be at least one gun in every house here. Couldn't they have taken care of it themselves?

He lies back on the king bed of a murderer and dreams of a Croatoan future, running, fleeing down the street with his shadow long before him, boots hitting hard, burned out cars and smouldering trash cans, air dry and rasping in his throat. By his feet dance the black heads of his pursuers. Their shadows trip him and his hands hit the ground and he finds it easier going like this, enough power in his legs to give him a long rolling animal gait, arms stretching forward to grab the road, hands locking into the gravel and grit of the asphalt and pulling it under him. He gains enough room to breathe, and turn, and regard the bodies coming for him. His pockets are hollow and his holster is empty. He curls his lips. 

When he wakes he is on his back, staring at a blank white ceiling that fucks with his hazy vision, seems like it's floating a foot above him; could be firmament cloud, could be a shroud, could be tombstone marble, serene and eternal, carving promises into his bones.

::

He crawls northeast. Muscatine has a haunting in a converted factory that leaves him with pearl buttons shoved so far down his throat it takes him days before he can cough without gagging. An old man in Waukegan lets him sleep in his boat for three nights in return for protection against a selkie, being an ear for his conspiracy theories, and doing all the booze runs. Dean lies crammed into the v-berth and listens to the man ramble about camps of crazies living in the subway tunnels of New York, about the President's personal virus-makers, about Cuba machine-gunning American refugees in the water.

On the fourth day Dean gets back to find the guy taken by the selkie. Either that or he took a nosedive into the water while drunk. Equally likely. Dean gets her that night as payback anyway, and spends the rest of the week recovering in the guy's boat. Sam would have hated to be part of this one, he thinks, chugging penicillin and sweating through his shirts, waiting for the fever to burn its way out. Sam always had a thing for selkie lore, for standing on the beach staring longingly at another life. Turns out they're ugly, angry bitches, just like everything else, mundane to the point of tears, vengeance in their hearts and disease under their claws.

::

He stalls out in Appleton, in a drooping outskirts motel. The TV is a shitheap, even the cable fuzzy and dull. The wifi is so slow he wants to punch his laptop every time he tries it. His room becomes a snowdrift of newspaper. Local, interstate, national. He comes up empty every time. Jody would laugh if she could see him, spit his words in his face and she'd be right to. What's a hunter without a hunt?

The guy two rooms down beats on his girl. Dean hears them at it on his way in one night, kicks open the door and puts him down, and while he's working on that the girl brains Dean with his own bottle of whiskey, which is, in Dean's opinion, quite rude.

He doesn't black out but he must not be driving right, because a cop picks him up pretty easy. It doesn't make much sense, a lot of fuzz blearing one thing into another. A few hours later the walls of the lockup swim into focus in front of his eyes. His hands are bandaged. His head is about as bad as it's ever been.

He's digging the lock pick out of the seam of his jacket when they turf him. For this unexpected assist he has to thank some chick in a bank somewhere, who went bad and decided to staple her boss to death. No one can be bothered with a homeless vigilante, they tell him, and slap his keys in his hand, and point him down the road out of town.

::

In Gary he takes out a minor god and then falls down the I-65 and winds up in a bar in Louisville. The woman serving, in her whiskey-worn voice and the way she pours, reminds him a little of Ellen, which is something he's been kinda looking for for a while now. She notices.

It's a moderately depressing encounter. The last really good sex he had was that second time with Gretchen, adrenaline sex, near-death stuff. Before her, maybe with that waitress, back when he was black-eyed. This go-around it's a little drink-blurred for both of them, and he's paranoid because he can't remember the last time he had a shower. But she gets a kick out his strength as he lies back and helps her ride him, and they both get off, which is the point. 

He stays east of the Mississippi, hops her tributaries; clears a couple of bad ones out of a pretty redbrick building in Parkersburg and promptly gets lost in the identical fucking county routes winding through the hills, trying to lose a car of big-dick staties with nothing better to do. 

It leaves him bouncing around, trapped between the river and the nerve-bundles of the east coast. He finds himself a whole family spirits to dig up in Asheville, his least favourite powdery kind of soil running a foot deep and underneath, hard-packed half-frozen earth that forces him to break out the pickaxe. An arduous all-nighter, the moon turning hatefully, implacably. He pauses at four for a drink and all he can smell is dirt, ground into his skin, under his fingernails, in his mouth. Across the path in front of him the Virgin Mary holds out welcoming hands, glowing white against the grey marble of the mausoleum, CORLEONE large in gold leaf above her. 

It gives him a flicker of amusement, joins the collection of dumb shit he's seen by himself. He still remembers digging up one V. Card the first time he did this without his dad, giggling all night until he got arrested. He'd also developed a blister over half his palm and it got infected, and he hadn't been able to jerk off right for a week.

He rinses his mouth with whiskey and spits on the ground.

He cracks the caskets and burns them without incident, murderous couple on one side of the plot, kid on the other, nice and dry and ready to fry, and has no time to breathe before he has to start filling them back in. The sun, hidden by clouds, is well above the horizon before he leaves, growling past a funeral director giving him the usual civilian bewilderment, her nice little suit turning the burgundy-black of dried blood in the heavy grey light.

::

He hitches his wagon to a bunch of cops for an afternoon, after a hiking trip turns bloody, hunting a wayward bad one up through the Oconee. It shouldn't be out here. It doesn't belong in this scenery, trees everywhere, freaking waterfalls. The place looks like a fucking Bob Ross painting.

The cops all seem to think it'll head downhill towards the lake, as though it were still rational, so Dean splits off and tracks it up over the lip of a small ridge of rock. The body's broken on the ground below, two vultures already going at it, shuffling in a way that makes it seem like the thing's still moving.

He puts his gun away and backtracks, walks down around the ridge, pushing branches away from his face. The air is heavy and cold, threatening to rain, and he still smells it long before he sees it. 

It's definitely dead. 

One of the birds lifts its head and fixes him with its black eyes, string of muscle or tendon hanging from its beak. Its face is red and wrinkled and scabby-looking, like there's no difference between it and what it's eating. It tilts its head and takes a step forward.

Dean gets the bizarre thought that it's recognised him, and he opens his mouth automatically, poised on the edge of saying something.

It explodes in feathers at the same time as he hears the shot. The second one gets a foot off the ground before it's hit too.

“It's okay, sir, I got it from here,” the cop says, holding out a hand to keep Dean back, his gun still trained on the body like its brains aren't cooling in the open air.

“Why did you do that?” Dean asks, wavering between shell-shocked and pissed.

“Can't have them spreading the disease. Step back please, sir.”

“That's not how it works.”

The cop eyes him scornfully and turns away to speak into his radio. Dean watches him as he creeps up to the thing and kicks it with his boot, setting a few feathers free to scatter in the wind. Dean watches him holster his weapon finally and duck his head to his radio again.

Dean has a pistol too, his ivory-handled Colt, snug in the back of his jeans. Dean can use it any time he wants. Dean hasn't slept very much lately, and last night he dreamed about the racks of Hell again, Alistair behind him with his arms circled around, cooing in his ear and pulling at Dean's fingers, smoothing the bone into long hooked blades. They looked like normal hands, and the people were always glad to see him, at first.

::

He gets wind of some bullshit that takes him all the way down to Fort Meyers before he realises it's just regular Florida crazy. He puts the locals on it and spends a day looking for a half-remembered place in Lake City that does waffles good enough for a specific detour.

He's squirreled in the corner watching the sky go from red to black when Donna's number rings up on his phone, dragging heavy and dark at his mood. He doesn't want any news. He doesn't want to know what terrible thing has happened. 

He stares at it for a moment that runs long enough for it to ring out and start up again. He sighs and picks up.

“Donna.”

“Heya, Dean. How's it going?”

“Good.” She doesn't respond, seems to expect a bit more from him. “What's wrong? Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, no, we're all shipshape. I thought I would just touch base, you know. See how you are.”

“I'm fine. Better than fine, these waffles are incredible.”

There's a long silence. The window he's looking out is double-glazed, giving a weird double-layer of reflection depending on where he focuses his eyes. The cars on the road outside could be stationary and he moving. Where the fuck is he going.

“So Dean,” she says, and her voice is so careful it makes him grit his teeth. “I don't mean to pry, but I was just wondering, you know. When are you coming home? _Are_ you coming home?”

He clears his throat, pokes his food with his fork. The ice cream and whipped cream have melted together into a puddle, turned the waffles doughy and raw-looking. He pushes the plate away.

“Actually, I've been thinking about that place. You need somewhere more permanent. More defensible.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I cleared out a school.” Dean pauses, twists his mouth in concession. “Actually, I left it in a bit of a mess.”

“A school? You want us to live in a school?”

“There's a town that comes along with it.”

“I'm sorry, Dean, I'm not really.... Where is this?”

“Not far. Cherry County.”

There's another long silence.

“That's hours away. That's. That's a blackout county. There's literally nothing there.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and leans back in the chair, looks up at the ceiling and wipes his hand over his face. “Like I said.”

Voices piping up in the background. God, the whole fucking gang's probably there. What is he, some kind of sideshow?

“I don't understand, Dean. We live here. Jody's going back to work next week. Only part time, but--”

“Look, I gotta go,” he interrupts, and can't help the churn of regret that rolls through him, the way his voice sags into a mumble. “Take care of yourself, Donna.” 

She's still talking when he hangs up. He stares at the phone a while, and turns it off, and signals for another coffee, lets the night roll in.

::

Walking down Main St, Tiny Town, LA he gets bogged down in a Sunday-best crowd milling in front of a church. There are tears, raised voices that raise Dean's hackles. Onlookers are starting to gather on the other side of road.

Dean had hoped to discreetly restock on graveyard bellflower but he's going to have to abandon it. This is a bad time and place to be a stranger. In the night someone has taken an axe to the plainwood cross out front of the Church of the Good Shepherd and it lurches drunkenly, not fully severed.

He cuts right to avoid a coagulation of hard-looking men and gets channelled towards the priest, who's trying to calm down a woman with a face so torn up Dean can't tell if it's anger or sorrow making her cry. As Dean passes the priest looks up and directly at him, piercing blue gaze from under a heavy brow and Dean loses his step, staggering, fumbling feeling like he's naked and this old man knows he's here on a wrongdoing, has slaughter up his sleeve and in his pocket and in his boots and bones, has need in his heart bad enough to damn the world.

He turns away, shaken to his core, and pushes through the crowd, too close, breathing all his air. What would Pastor Jim think of him now if he could see. What would Bobby. What would Charlie. Death on the land and in him too and he's sick of it, sick of it, dirty with it, no river left that could cleanse him, no hand that could forgive.

::

There's a mess of bodies piled in a derailed boxcar north of Little Rock, and then again two weeks later in a house a little farther down the line. The locals think it's a few bad ones but it's the same gig as Myrtle Beach, monsters coming out under the cover of Darkness.

Dean flashes his badge at the line cop and steps through to the bedroom, looks around. The victims are young men and women, good-looking. Signs they'd been kept here for days. Wounds on the neck, breasts, inner thighs. It's vamps, the kind that've seen _Interview with the Vampire_ too many times, having a grand old time. Dean thinks the bedspread was probably white at some point.

This town isn't much more than a post office and a church. They don't have a clue. As he leaves, the head honcho is on the phone to the Guard and his deputy is calling in help from Russellville. Dean wants to bounce the guy's head off the bedroom window, hold his face to the glass and ask him if he thinks it might be too late. 

It takes him three days to track the nest down to a sawmill, a big old-man shed with a beard of rust and vine and a little cluster of babies for the tractors or whatever to live in. He climbs the roof of one and watches them for about half an hour. Eight or so and it doesn't look like they have anyone human in there yet, too lazy and sated for it maybe, only one guard posted.

Dean checks the sky. It's coming on to dusk, and the clouds are thick and dark. If he left now he'd have time to hit up a morgue for some dead man's blood; he could go back to the motel for a solid night's sleep, return at high noon tomorrow.

The guard walks right under him, singing to himself, something country. Garth Brooks, Dean realises. Fucking Friends In Low Places.

He drops the knife and the machete over the side of the roof and steps off himself, ten-foot drop interrupted by the vamp's shoulders. He rolls and recovers easily and picks up his weapons while the vamp's still breathing dirt.

Two more vamps boozing in front of the doors. 

Two going at it in the backseat of an American-made parked in a garage around the side.

Four asleep in the mill itself, dark and cobwebbed and creaking. Just bare infrastructure left and the ghost of pine in the air. He kills them. Staring down at the last, its head still rocking in the black blood, he starts to wonder if it would even be worth rolling their bodies into a pile, if he needs to worry about clean up at all. If they can disguise their murders as madness why shouldn't he? Hell, he has more of a right than they do.

He turns to leave and gets slammed, vast sledgehammer blow to his back. He hits the conveyor hard, at a bad angle and his ribs take the worst of it, blend of shock and pain, lungs knocked free of air. He loses the machete, fingers nerveless.

“Hunter,” she spits. She turns him and gets fingers in his hair and teeth to his neck before he can breathe. Presses her body full against him and laps at the cut she's made. Her tongue is Jabba-the-Hutt disgusting, too greedy, too wide. 

“Worse than that,” he gasps, and makes his own cut: he stabs her through the back. There's no power in it, pulling the knife towards yourself, but he gets lucky on the angle, up between her ribs and she screams and throws him again, to the side this time. He rolls through the pain and comes up fast and almost too slow, valuable second lost pulling his boot knife to stab her up through the soft underside of her jaw.

She doesn't convulse or drop to the floor like a human would. But it gives her something to think about, makes her flail, blood pouring out her nose. 

It gives him enough time to find the machete.

::

Sam is in his room. Sitting on his bed.

He wonders a moment if he's hallucinating, if she knocked his head so bad he's having a full on breakdown. Or maybe she's still sucking at his neck, drained him to the penultimate drop, and this is what he gets instead of re-lived memories.

“Surprise,” Sam says, strange look on his face.

Dean's heart starts back up and he lowers the gun, puts his bag on the table and pretends to rummage through it, keeps his face turned away. The ibuprofen is taking forever to kick in and his ribs are killing him. He needs to have a shower. He needs a drink. He's already finished off the flask. The booze is in his other bag, by the bed.

Sam is on his bed. 

He swallows and keeps his eyes on his hands, rubs his thumb across his knuckles. Bits of sawdust in some of the cuts, it looks like. His voice is hoarse from breathing it in.

“What are you doing here?”

Sam's silent long enough that it starts to get rude. Dean is forced to glance over at him and he smiles, brief and bland.

“I need your help.”

Dean grunts, digs some more sawdust and blood from under his nails.

“How did you find me?”

“Are you trying to be lost?”

Dean folds his arms and scowls, and Sam tilts his head in honest curiosity.

“You might be able to run from _them_ , Dean. But did you think you can hide from _me_?”

The way he says this gets inside Dean and he grits his teeth and shakes his head. He's not hiding, not anymore. He's doing what he's gotta do, and now. Fucking Sam here, filling his head up again, nothing's different. 

“What do you want.”

“Come to Colorado with me.”

“What's in Colorado?”

“An evil eye.”

“So go get it.”

“It's attached to a hag,” Sam shrugs.

Dean can't bear to look at him any longer, turns away starts pushing around the little pamphlets on top of the TV impotently, his head roaring. This is bad. He should leave. He's got his go bag in arm's reach. The rest he can rebuild. He's got cash and his car keys. He puts his hand in his pocket and curls his fingers around them, lets the teeth dig into his palms. 

He turns back to the room.

“What kind of hag?”

Sam opens his mouth and hesitates. “I'll tell you on the way.”

Dean bites the inside of his cheek. “No.”

“Yes,” Sam says, mild as a daisy, his clothes all clean, his cheeks clear of stubble, his neat little pile of research resting next to him on the bed. Dean snarls.

“I'll go run your little errand, Sam, but I'm not. It's not a good time. I don't want any fucking burdens.”

“Burden, huh.” Sam nods slowly to himself, eyes going to Dean's hand pressed to his ribcage, flitting to his neck. Dean glares at him. So what if he got tossed around a little, he's still here, that's how it works. What the hell would Sam know about it these days? 

Sam stands, quick enough and tall enough to stagger Dean's heart, make him shift his weight to the balls of his feet: he's got this wrong, he realises, all Sam's pretty pleasant words, his nonchalant voice. He forgot how sharp and vicious Sam's despair could run. 

The room kicks bright and bold around him. Fear. These moods of Sam's. This is what got them here in the first place. 

“I have a question for you,” Sam says, easy as the end of the world. “Are you ever gonna be able to look at me again?” 

Dean is shaking his head. Has maybe been doing it some time now.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Sam takes one great step forward and grabs Dean by the shoulders in a grip that twists him all wrong, searing pain in his chest and back and it puts Dean over the top, blood red in his eyes with Sam here needing something from him, his brother in a mood that would tear everything down if Dean didn't fight it, didn't meet him with bared teeth. How can they be back there? 

He turns his head to the side and tests Sam's grip and can't get away and Sam is so close, his hands like steel, thumbs digging into the hollows of Dean's shoulders. His voice is soft in Dean's ear, pleading, and he knows Dean too well, he knows exactly where Dean's gone.

“Forgive me.”

Every ounce of fight dies in Dean, a long slow unlocking sway. He looks back at his brother. It's beyond his control.

“Always,” he whispers, helpless, and that makes Sam worse somehow, like it wasn't the answer he wanted to hear. He leans in more, and Dean has to crane his head back a little, heart in his throat. He can see every grain of Sam's skin, the bruises under his eyes, his cracked lips. He can see the starfield flecks in Sam's eyes.

“Forgive yourself.”

“I--” He closes his eyes briefly and swallows. “Sam. I'm sorr– ”

“Stop.” Sam's mouth twists in disgust. “Don't say that. How dumb do you think I am? What do you think I went down there for?”

“I _know_ what you went down there for, Sam,” he hisses. “That's why I did it.”

“Did _what_? You didn't even _do_ anything!”

This last comes out in a rising howl of frustration and Sam drops him, finally, sends him stumbling backwards. He whirls and sweeps Dean's bag off the table in one powerful shove, battering it against the wall. He stares down at it, shoulders heaving, fists clenched, jaw set. He doesn't look at Dean.

“I'll be back in the morning,” he grits, and slams out the door. Dean barely hears him. Sam and his fucking guilt, it burns through him like a firestorm. Dean didn't _do_ anything? Dean had looked at him and hated him, brutally, perfectly. Dean had hurt him. Dean had held him down and pawed at him, his own brother, and Sam let him. He would have let Dean rape him. He would have let Dean kill him and taken it as his due, and what does that make Dean, then, nothing, just the Mark, just the Darkness, just a blade himself, available for anyone who wanted to wield it.

::

Sam stares out the window a lot. Dean tries and fails to remember if it's more or less than before, than in the old days. Ten hours of the wide flat land of the middle of the country, clear through two separate thunderstorms. He tries to keep himself in order but his hands keep clenching around the wheel involuntarily, grasping like the road or the land under it will slip away from him. His chest still aches from yesterday, not sharp enough to be a bruised or broken rib but sore enough to be the only thing keeping him on track.

Another hour. He scratches at the cuts on his neck and opens up the scab a little, blood under his fingernails when he checks. Nothing resolves. He shakes out his hands and wraps them more firmly around the wheel, looks ahead. These long straight heartland roads he always gets into the unconscious habit of tapping his left foot as every power pole slips past, wide arms and the cabalistic cross keeping them steady.

Meaner and meaner back roads as they cross into Colorado and the clouds come in again; he hopes Sam doesn't think he's delaying. There aren't too many options around here if you want to keep off the interstate.

Sam finishes looking out the window and starts looking through his notes, wordless. Why did he insist on coming along if he was going to be such a nothing?

_This is it_ , Sam, he'd said before they left this morning. He'd meant it. This last one is all he has left in him. He's not sure if Sam believes him. He's eaten those words plenty of times in the past. But it's different now, of course. 

He scratches his stubble and rubs at his face, his eyes sore and tired, and rolls down the window. Bright fresh air floods the car. Sam's papers flap and he squawks at Dean and Dean rides that feeling another fifty miles through field and field and field. It all looks the same, even bare and untended and unfriendly; all this place has done is become more itself.

A half hour later he finds himself standing on a bridge, watching his brother attempt to stop an old woman from drowning someone in a creek, someone with long pale arms, thrashing and throwing up water. Eventually Sam gives up trying to pull her off and just clocks her on the back of the head with the butt of his gun. She screams and releases her victim.

It's a goat.

It rights itself with difficulty, rocks turning under its hooves, and totters up and away into the grass, shaking its head and bleating in long frightened screams.

Granny wails as well, a long raging keen, and starts biting at the air, at Sam's hands. Sam jerks away and she stumbles, falls forward and smashes her cheek on a rock, starts biting at it. Dean's gorge rises at the sound of teeth scraping and grinding.

“She's gone, Sam,” Dean calls down to him, and the thing thinks he's talking to it, lets out another wail and clutches its stomach, its face a red mask under its neat little perm. Sam won't stop staring. “She's gone. Put it out of its misery.”

Sam looks at him for the first time in what feels like forever, sorrow in his eyes that Dean doesn't let touch him. When it's the end, it's the end. No point making a fuss. He keeps his gaze impassive and Sam nods, sets his face and raises the gun again, but it takes something out of him, turns the ride tired and uncomfortable, sleet-grey sky outside the car, baking inside with the heat turned up to dry Sam's jeans. He finishes going through his notes and flips them, starts back in on page one.

“Hey,” Dean says, and Sam doesn't even seem to hear it. “Hey. So what's the deal with this evil eye? You gonna put a curse on someone? Cause I got a few candidates.”

Sam glances at him, expressionless and Dean raises an eyebrow, tries to catch his attention.

“There was this hippy chick in San Francisco who – well let's just say she was lousy. And I don't mean she was bad.”

There's a long pause. Dean ticks away a few more power poles.

“That's gross,” Sam says, grudging note in his voice.

“You get my meaning?”

“Yes, Dean, I get your meaning,” Sam groans. He sighs and closes his folder, squares it away on his lap. “It's not for me. It's for a trade.”

“Yeah? What for?”

“You remember that book from Texas? It has a sequel.”

It's not what Dean was expecting, and his mood shifts down several gears, heart sinking.

“Seems like a lot of effort.”

“It might have excerpts from the Book of the Damned. I think the guy smuggled it in from Israel.”

Dean presses his lips together. Sam won't learn, he never learns. This is getting out of control. He should have been down there to put a stop to it when it raised its head. 

“Don't fool yourself, Sam.”

“I can fix it,” Sam says, rote, nothing as fierce as he used to be. Dean aches for him. He keeps his voice sure and firm.

“You can't fix it, not this one. This is the way it's always been heading. We staved it off a couple of years is all.”

More silence. He glances over. Sam is staring at him, eyes wide.

“You don't. You really think that?” He asks, and Dean shrugs. “Donna says it might be getting better. Or at least stabilising.”

“The eternal optimist.”

Sam glares at him and turns stiffly away to look out the window again. Dean sighs, digs a knuckle into his eyes. He's exhausted. Starving. He doesn't know how much time he can put aside for this.

Fuck it. When he hits the highway he's going south. Trinidad is closer, he'll grab something to eat with enough cheese on it to put down a horse, and they'll find a motel there and lie down amongst the cockroaches and stains and Sam can call Donna and they can gossip about their new-found Shangri-La-On-Earth the whole night long for all Dean cares.

::

Sam shakes him awake; it's too much of a wrench, and Dean comes up gasping, slugs him on the chin and he falls back with a yelp. Dean doubles over, heart pounding. He's drenched. His hands are fisted so tight the healed knuckle in his left aches like it's going to fail again.

No monsters this time, no Hell. An avalanche. Ground turning to rubble and shard and leaving his feet and an airless weight smashing him from above, tumbling him like a wave, spinning him out smothered and battered. 

Eyes closed he wraps his fingers in the sheets and curls them, thin fabric threatening to tear under the pressure. 

Sam puts a tentative hand to his back and Dean shies away. 

“You're still having nightmares?” 

“No, Sam, I'm standing on my head whistling Dixie,” he snaps, and Sam retreats, lets him lie back down with his face to the wall, shirt clammy but he's not swapping it, he can barely move; there's no point, no escape, nothing but the end coming for him: today, tonight, tomorrow, he's gonna wake one day and look for it and it'll all be gone and he'll have to go himself.

::

All Dean can do is thank any deity that's listening that it's not still snowing. He has serious doubts about taking the Impala this far along a shitty service road in the winter this high up. She's heavy enough to dig through the crust of snow into the ground but it's dicey, dicey going, and he puts a stop to it sooner than Sam would like. It'll mean more walking but he'll be damned if his last act on earth is betraying the earnest faith of his baby.

Sam's only been able to figure out the general direction of the hag's den, and they trudge switchback arcs through the pine and up a peak beyond the campground. Dean doesn't like it. The trees are dense and dark and dripping and all this walking is a very good way to be too fucked to fight. His boots get heavier at every step and the cold and effort makes his ribs ache. The slope up ahead is a lot steeper.

“It won't be too much further,” Sam says, breath frosting, pausing to knock the snow off his boots. “The trees are starting to thin.”

“You sure you got the right mountain? In case you hadn't noticed there's a few around, and I'm not seeing much to write home about here.”

“Just a matter of perspective, Dean,” Sam says, and holds out the tin he'd spent the morning fiddling with, mixing ash and various unpleasantness. Dean dabs a finger in there, makes the mistake of sniffing it, wipes it across his brow and can see like a veil's been dropped from his eyes, the lines of life and the stump-lined path downhill to their right, shadow of a cabin at the end.

As they near the clearing her hovel reveals itself further, inflated bladders hanging like tired balloons, breeze through hollow bones like a flute. Swayback patchy roof and sagging porch. Something dead and big enough to be an elk is stinking up the ground around the corner. Shredded bits of jacket and sleeping bag decorate bushes and branches in an ugly half-hearted crochet. 

He drops the duffel and arms himself, his Colt in his jeans and his sawn-off in his hand.

She opens the door when they hit the bottom of the porch steps.

She's big. Hunched, head hanging bear-like between her shoulders, over her breasts like the eye is too heavy for her neck, long stringy hair swaying in front of her face. They all stare at each other a while. Dean gets bored pretty quick.

“Hey, lady, some of us are on a schedule, you know.”

She turns her head a fraction and Dean feels the full weight of her gaze like a drill to the chest, skin crawling. Her voice is deep and explosive, gravel crush that sounds like tectonic plates grating.

“I can see one who is.”

After a beat Sam turns to look at him too, and Dean shotguns her and she flies back into the shadow of the cabin. He levers another shell into the chamber and follows her inside.

The door slams behind him and he glimpses her on the floor before a grunting choking roar rips through the trees outside, a rapid succession of shots. He shoots her in the gut again as he steps past to the window, sees a lumbering shape disappearing into the trees and Sam is nowhere. He must have fled.

More shots, further away this time, and a noise behind him. She's writhing on the floor, a grey shape in a tattered dress, dim oil-lamp and the pale reflected snow-light from outside all that's lighting the place. He pulls his pistol and empties the mag into her chest until she stops jerking.

The door is still locked, jammed, all his weight hauling on it useless. He runs back to the window and lifts the shotgun, stock first.

“Vandal.”

He whirls. She's on her hands and knees, spits blood onto the floor, clots dribbling down her chin.

“Marauder.”

She bares her brown teeth at him, reaches up and tucks her hair behind her ears. Dean raises his gun and looks away quickly.

“You gonna curse me?”

“Death-dealer,” she grunts, and pushes herself to her feet. Weak pulse in the gleaming flow down the front of her rags. “You are cursed already.”

He can see her eyes now, one yellow and oversize, grown into her cheekbone, the other normal, clear, pale enough in the weak light to be just a black pinpoint of iris. 

“Do you know yourself, child?” She says, and steps closer, and the black of her eye swells, grows as large as her face, as large as the room, the world. Her voice tolls like a bell underneath. “Do you think you are bigger than the forces that work you?” 

She makes her move too soon, with the last of her strength, and he wakes, gets his shotgun up to her neck as she reaches him, shoots as she takes him down, her head snapping back with a great gout of blood and her body, vast and immovable, pinning him in her death, stink of her viscera and rancid self, her gore in his nose, his eyes and ears, choking him, drowning him.

::

He comes to blind and in a colossal shudder, thrashing free from her weight, and throws up violently, with jack-knife force, copper and bile mixing on his tongue making him gag again. The panic won't let him draw enough breath. He's afraid to touch his face. He coughs, a wracking spasm, hands clenching, and he half expects to have a blade or hammer in his fingers.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. 

Sam's voice distant, calling his name. Far away, or are his ears fucked as well? He spits and hollers.

Wood splintering, a bang and Sam's hands are on him. 

“Hey hey hey I'm right here, don't move, it's okay.”

“I can't see.”

“Jesus, your eyes are all gummed up with blood, hang on.”

“Sam, I can't–” He hears his own voice fracture. 

“It's okay, I'm gonna get something to wash your face, okay?” Dean feels him pull away and he clutches, locks his fingers around his brother's forearm. “Actually you know what come with me, come on. Don't touch it, I don't know how bad it is.”

The weird ground-fall sensation of Sam practically lifting him, getting under his arm to haul him along the uneven floor and keep him upright when he stumbles on the step outside. One of his knees is skinned and bare to the air. 

Sam pivots him and lowers him onto a stump, steps away. Dean fists his hands on his thighs and tries not to scrub, dried and drying blood itchy, pulling at his skin.

Slosh of a bottle and a wet rag across his eyes, cold. Sam's hand covering the span of his face entirely. After half a minute he removes it and rewets it, starts wiping gently. 

Sunlight through the cracks like a consecration, white glint of snow. Dean could cry. He thinks he might be, a little, his eyes sore, unable to focus, his eyelashes heavy, sticky. He squints, scrunches his face. Sam is crouched in front of him, knees getting wet in the snow. There are twigs in his hair, a graze on the corner of his jaw.

“There you go,” Sam says, and smiles, a poor effort, his lips trembling. Dean tries a smile back but it must look hideous, Sam paling even further. He swallows and puts the rag to Dean's forehead again. There's a complicated look on his face. Dean watches him and wonders absently if this is what it had been like after Metatron gutted him. He wishes he had been awake for it.

At some point the rag gets too damp or dirty or something and Sam hitches his shirt cuff up and keeps scrubbing at his face and Dean would feel babied but his brother's hands are strong and firm smoothing over his cheeks and Dean is nothing less than present and alive, with his eyes on Sam's mouth and Sam's thumb touching down on his brow, tracing his eyebrows, the line of his eyelashes, making them flutter. 

“Hey Sam.”

“Yeah?” Sam rasps.

“Did you kill a bear?”

“Yeah.”

“That's pretty badass.”

Sam smiles at him again and Dean mirrors it. Something like vertigo is happening to him, and he puts a hand on Sam's knee to brace himself and Sam makes a small noise and stands abruptly, turning away too slow for Dean to miss the pale vague horror washing over his face. 

Dean's stomach lurches again, roiling and empty. His brain is a mess. He needs to get himself under control. 

Sam's covered his flinch by rummaging in the bag for the flashlight. He taps it against his palm a couple of times and looks around. The day's turning old, his skin golden in the light. 

“We should go.”

“Yeah,” Dean says.

Sam bends over and checks his pupils, light flashing in and out of his eyes, Sam like an afterburn or flare behind. The shape of him stays in Dean's eyes longer than it should, flitting over snow and the backs of Dean's eyelids and the palms of his hands, wherever he looks.

Sam straightens and sighs through his nose and turns his head towards the cabin, some kind of grievous thought slumping his shoulders, breaking him down.

“I'll get the eye, I suppose,” he says, and pulls his knife out of his belt, brushes his thumb across the edge. He doesn't seem to know if he wants to go or stay. Dean can see his throat bobbing. “Guess it didn't help her any.”

Sam has wiped away the gunk on Dean's forehead, and when Dean follows his gaze all he sees in the clearing is straggling brush and a few fallen trees, bent and broken by the snow. How long had she lived here? Surely she'd known it couldn't last. 

“Some people just don't wanna see what's coming,” Dean says, copper bright on his tongue, chest crushing like he's still held under her weight, and Sam keeps his eyes fixed on the invisible cabin, and doesn't reply.

::

They get down into the badlands and find a motel and Dean takes a long, long shower. He's got blood and grime in places he didn't even know he had, uses up an entire bar of the hard little soap that came with the place. The hot water works freedom into his shoulders, his back, and steam gets in his lungs. He breathes in deep and feels scoured and new.

After he gets out Sam washes down the eye in the bathroom sink. It's as large and round as a tennis ball and rock solid, iris and pupil faded nearly invisible. There are little notches on each side where the muscles attached. Dean rolls it from hand to hand, holds it up to his face. 

“Hey, Sam. Hey. Sam.” Sam sighs and looks up from his packing, wary. “You sure are a sight for sore eyes.”

Sam casts his own eyes to the ceiling and groans.

“Get in the car.”

They grab quesadillas on the way out of town and eat them at a rest stop perched over the 191 that Dean is pretty sure he's been to before. There's a family over by the scrubby playground, just a tree and a swing and a seesaw and some rocks. Motorhome parked out by the road where the trucks are, happy shouts of the kids as they push each other over. Dean itches to tell them to get inside. Truth is, they're probably safer out here. 

“Look at that, Sammy. Not even the zombie apocalypse is gonna stop America vacationing.”

Sam gives him a funny look and shoves the rest of his lunch in his mouth, gets up to use the phone booth over by the road. Whatever mood he was in up at the cabin is gone now, replaced by something stoic and resigned. Dean watches him go, sinks into familiar sight of the back of him, long legs in jeans, jacket hanging square from his shoulders, long fingers tucking his hair behind his ears. No one in the world like him.

It's too much and he turns away, pops the hood on the car. Colorado didn't fuck her up at all, thankfully. Probably some of that slush-mud he'd wanna get out of her underside before it turned to concrete, but the guts of her are solid as ever. Been a while since he did anything more substantial than replace her spark plugs and she'll go on a good way yet. He grabs a rag and wipes grime off her headers, runs his hand around the curve of her air filter. Bobby helped him put this one in; or the first one at least, a few dinks and dents and semi-serious collisions taking care of the others in between. 

It's noisy out here, cars shooting by, the growl of trucks. The kids are yelling in fright but it's play-fright, high and joyful, like their alarm makes them happier. It's not a feeling Dean recognises.

“You gotta choose a name first!” Screams the smallest boy, swiping at the others' feet with a branch. They tumble over each other to avoid it and the girl runs halfway across the lot and then turns and runs back again, breathless with laughter. 

Their dad catches Dean watching and scowls, puffs himself up in challenge and Dean gives him a quick smile and looks away, for his brother. Some trucker douche is hammering on the glass. Sam glares at him, hangs up and strolls back, parks his ass on the backrest of the bench next to Dean, feet on the seat. He clears his throat and looks out over the mesa.

“He says he can be in Las Cruces by five tomorrow.”

Dean makes a face, checks the oil dipstick.

“Not the desert again.” 

“We can make it though, right?”

“Yeah, Sammy.”

Sam frowns at him. Dean busies himself ensuring the cap is tight and secure.

“Did something happen--”

“Hey motherfucker, you owe me three bucks.” Trucker Douche has reappeared and crosses his arms, seems to think he looks intimidating. Sam blinks at him.

“What?”

“She's not picking up. You wasted my fucking time and my fucking money. So give me my three bucks back.”

“What? No,” Sam says, and stands up to his full height. It's not gonna work, Dean can tell that, but he thrills to see it anyway. There's a power in his brother not owed to his size, that springs from something else, his foundational certainty, his ability to endure. It can come out gentle or it can come out fierce but it's always overwhelming and most people don't stand a chance. 

Course, most people aren't meth-ed to the gills.

“I ain't asking, pretty boy.”

“I'm sure she's done with the pool guy by now,” Sam snaps. “Why don't you try again?”

Douche growls and pulls a little pocketknife, flips it open and Dean laughs, drops the hood and wipes his hands on his jeans.

“Come on buddy, don't ruin a nice day, huh?” He says, and Sam spares him a secret amused look. Dean sticks his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels and gives Douche a sunny smile. He and his brother are shoulder to shoulder and the guy flicks his eyes between them, snarls again and backs down quicker than a church mouse, scuttles and mutters his way back to his truck. 

They perch themselves on the bench again, watch him grind his gears out of the lot. Dean pulls out his flask and doesn't feel a pang when Sam refuses a taste, is content to sit and drink and stare out over the land, the plunge off the edge. Thunderclouds out over the plain heading across to meet the sun. Burnt red and orange and the jagged shadow of crevice and canyon. The sun lights it all up, shows up the cracks in the firm earth. Can't pretend you don't see it. You're a liar or a fool if you think otherwise.

“Hey,” he says, with a remote kind of curiosity. “You think they go to Purgatory?”

“Huh?” Sam glances at him, taken aback.

“The things, the woman you shot. Where do you think she went?”

San presses his lips together.

“I dunno, Dean. Hell, probably.”

“Yeah, but humans go to Hell.”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Sam says, slowly, like Dean's a moron. “Do we really have to talk about this _now_?”

“Just wondering,” Dean shrugs, tips the flask back. Shit, the rate Sam beats himself up about stuff like this he figured Sam might want a chance to get it off his chest.

Midges swarm and gambol in front of them. Dean swipes a hand through to break up the party and they disappear, leaving Sam fidgety and restless next to him. He wants to get moving too. If Dean delays much more he'll probably head off by himself. 

Dean should let him. Sam's hand on his face back at that cabin; Sam's hand over his heart back in that barn. There's no one else. Never could have been. It's been ugly and brutal but the way Sam is, his stubborn genius and his heart and the slope and spark of his eyes when he smiles; there's no way for anyone, even Dean, to love his brother and not have it contain some measure of grace.

She was right. This thing he has for Sam will work him to his last breath. As well as the other thing he is, he's that.

And that's. Maybe that's okay, now, at the end. 

“C'mon, Sammy, let's git 'er done,” he says, and stands.

::

They make it within a couple of hours of the rendezvous before stopping for the night. It's been hard to keep hold of the feeling from the mesa, time pressure taking over in his heart, swollen and heavy in his chest.

In another bar next door to a motel, warm with beer and a true wood fire that's burning wood too sappy, like crackers going off every few minutes, sparks hitting the air and dancing for longer than they should. Dean accepts the regular cherry-bomb spasm like a gift, keeping his nerves awake and alive enough to not slip into complacency across the table from his brother on a stiff leather bench.

Sam is absorbed in his laptop, has been about an hour now. One beer only and a bit of chicken because pork's too expensive at the moment. Sam had licked his thumb clean before wiping his hands on the napkins. He hasn't looked at Dean more than three or four times since they got here, but it's an animate, comfortable silence. Dean feels good about it. It feels right.

“Another?”

Sam hums his yes and keeps typing.

He heads to the bar and signals and the bar chick purses her lips when she sees him in sharp evaluation. A lot of women have picked up this hard look by necessity since Dean messed up the world, but some had it before as well, of course. This one throws back her shot and touches her beer to his and gives him the eye with a pleasing lack of pretence, a fellow-feeling. She'll take it where she can get it.

He takes a beer back to the table and sets it down by Sam's elbow.

“Thanks,” Sam says and flashes him a brief smile. Dean thinks his brother should cut his hair again. Maybe that's what makes him look so sad all the time. 

Back at the bar he drinks his drink while she dries glasses and finds reasons to be down the end of the bar with him. Brenda's been doing this a while. Has a daughter. Dead husband, some time ago. Unlike most people she doesn't want to swap stories of the week after it happened, which is another point in her favour.

For Dean's part he tells her about how he and his brother are on the road, have always been on the road, moving through, helping people. 

“You look like the type who goes looking for trouble,” she says.

“Trouble finds me,” he shrugs, and grins sly and wide. 

“You don't say,” she says, gives it right back to him.

“Mmhmm. When's your break?”

“Any time I want.”

“You don't say.”

She narrows her eyes at him and tilts her head back.

“Gimme five.”

He nods, finishes his beer and looks around. The bar is still pretty dead even at this time of night. Before, it's the sort of place he would expect to be packed with losers, the sort of place he might have made some money in. 

Sam is still going at the laptop. He's started on his beer, so that's something at least. He never really learned to give it a rest, much as Dean tried to teach him. Maybe that's still to come, for Sam.

Brenda catches his eye from by the kitchen door and he heads over, follows her swinging ass through the swinging doors and waits as she has a word with the guy back there, sends him out front and takes Dean into a walk-in pantry, shelves of cans and dry goods, bottles of water. She's been stocking up. He nods his head in approval.

It's not a pleasant light in here that she comes to him under, dirty fluorescence washing her out, away from the fire-flicker. She shows her age a bit more. He likes that, even as he thinks that he must look like shit to her. He palms the small of her back as she gets in close and puts her nose to his neck and smells him, makes his heart thump once, twice, hard. He seizes the back of her shirt and pulls her off and kisses her.

She opens her mouth to him immediately. No sharp teeth. He wonders for an instant if there was any point caring and then she wipes all that away with her tongue, her mouth with its warm whiskey taste, the dip of her back under his hands. 

He curls his fingers under her shirt and his phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He sighs into her mouth and she mutters something frustrated he can't make out and gets a hand on his ass, tips her hips in, hungry enough to get his dick interested. 

His phone stops, and starts again.

She pulls back and frowns at him, flushed, lips swollen. 

“Could be an emergency.”

“It's not,” he says, and brushes a thumb across her nipple, teases it out through the layers. She lifts her chin and arches her back, breathes pretty and deep, keeps grinding him. 

His phone beeps with a message and he sighs again and digs it out his back pocket, tries to read over her shoulder while she unbuttons his shirt.

_I know where you are_

As he's staring at it, it shudders in his hand and another message appears.

_don't make me come get you_

He can't breathe. 

She picks up on his stillness, ducks her head to try to look him in the eye. He pulls away and she makes a noise and says _told you so_ in a tone that he decides is a turn-off. He shoves his phone in his pocket and does his shirt back up, fingers clumsy, runs a quick hand through his hair.

“Yeah, sorry,” he says, and she rolls her eyes. 

“Well. Come find me when you're on your way back through, I guess.”

“I'm not coming back,” Dean says and adjusts himself, leaves her in the storeroom and pushes through the kitchen door, ignoring the smirk of the grill jockey. 

The booth is empty. He curses under his breath and heads over to the motel room.

Sam is standing in the dark, thin curtains closed against the faint streetlight glow from outside. 

“This better be an emergency,” Dean says, makes it stern. He shuts the door behind him and doesn't turn on the light, tensed up instinctively at the sight of Sam, hindbrain-wary, something wound up very tight in his brother. Sam looks Dean up and down with a hard eye.

“Did you fuck her?”

“No.” How long did Sam think he was gone? 

“Were you going to?”

Dean considers and rapidly discards a number of answers. The lack of pretence in this room is dangerous. It could go very bad. He breathes shallowly. 

“Yes.”

Sam looks away from him, throat working. 

“I don't think I can do this anymore.”

Dean nods, puts away the flare of loss. He can feel his face falling and he makes sure it stays out of his voice.

“Yeah. Well look. You'll be fine to do the drop-off. I'll hit the road.” 

It seems to hit Sam like a betrayal, and he snaps his gaze back in on Dean. “That's it?”

It's like whiplash. What is this, does he want Dean to end it now? It's gonna end tomorrow by itself anyway. They could have had a drink together, and watched some crap TV. Dean was kinda looking forward to watching his brother fall asleep. Can't they have just one good night? 

He spreads his hands, perplexed.

“You know, I was in the middle of something over there. Why the fuck am I here, Sam? You got a spider in the bathroom needs stomping? What?”

“That's not what I--”

Dean cuts him off, slices a hand through the air.

“You want me to fuck off? That's why you brought me here? To tell me to go?”

Sam is staring at him, mouth open, shaping wordless replies. 

“I brought you here,” he repeats, dumbly.

“You made me come with you,” Dean says, and as he says it the energy shifts around him, tiny and alive, pinpoint holding him still, stopping his breath. “What am I here for?”

Sam makes a surprised, choked-off noise and presses a hand to the front of his jeans. Dean's mouth goes dry, eyes glued to the movement, too shadowed, but the thought of it makes him harder in an instant than he managed with Brenda minutes ago and Sam moves under the cover of Dean's pounding heart, backs him up against the wall and grabs Dean's head between his huge hands, heat blazing off him, searching Dean's eyes.

Dean freezes, waiting, waiting, and Sam licks his lips and the sight makes Dean die a little but Sam's nerve fails him. They've stood like this before and it never went that way. 

“I didn't do it on purpose,” Sam whispers. His thumbs push at Dean's cheeks, pulling at his lips, remaking him, and he tips his forehead to Dean's, eyes closed, his nose brushing along Dean's cheekbone. Dean leans into the pressure. “I never mean to. I can't help it. I'm sorry.” 

He drops his hands to Dean's belt, thick slide of the leather tugging at Dean's hips, pauses like he expects Dean to stop him but Dean is incapable, poleaxed, Dean has left the planet, and then he drops further and further and takes Dean's jeans and boxers with him to the ground.

Dean's breath leaves him in a rush that makes him dizzy and he can hear the words nononono floating in there somewhere as he hooks his fingers into Sam's hair and stills him. This is not right. In the dark, this dirty motel. His brother.

His dick loves the idea, loves Sam's hands moving up his thighs, fingers digging in. Sam turns his face into Dean's wrist, licks and sucks against Dean's pulse, gets Dean all the way hard with just that and the heartfall yearning Dean has for Sam, bruised feeling all over that Sam would want this, would ask for it, would offer himself so easily.

A gift he can't take, that's too risky and nothing he deserves, but maybe he can do the same for Sam, if – if this is gonna happen, for some crazy reason – if Sam wants it he can give himself, spent and faulty as he is, that's something he knows how to do. It's what he's good at. 

He takes hold of himself with his other hand, bites the inside of his lip, trying to keep steady as Sam turns away from his wrist and puts his cheek in contact with the head of Dean's dick. No air left in here, no air in Dean's lungs, just Sam's damp breath along the length of him, more than he would expect himself to be able to stand.

He can't stop himself moving a little, rubbing himself a little, Sam's stubble too much for his oversensitive skin. In the dark, nearly blind, slight shift and he's pressing at Sam's soft lips, the teeth behind, sharp inhale through Sam's nose as Sam tilts his head up to look at Dean, faint shine of light in his eyes, on the wet of his lips. Dean makes a noise he doesn't recognise. 

Sam opens his mouth in response.

And that's how it is, world broken down to the wet heat of his brother's mouth working, combing through his hair like Dean can make this a matter of care instead of the tight greedy need he feels; grateful for the wall at his back, his knees and thighs trembling. He doesn't know where to look. He can't look down; the shifting shadows are too dim, make the feeling too bright, it nearly kills him and he can't track the time but for the building urgency in him that it shouldn't be like this, his hand cupping his brother's skull, trying to be gentle.

“Sam, I – You don't have to –” The words choke him. Everything is pressing in. 

Too much, too much, he pushes Sam back, toes off his boots and his puddled jeans, ignoring the wounded noise Sam makes, falling back down by Dean's feet. He hauls Sam up and takes him over to the bed, twists them and Sam gets the picture then, pushes Dean down with fervent hands and covers him like a blanket, finding the places their legs fit, kisses him finally: opens Dean's mouth up and kisses him deep and dumbstruck, his hair falling in Dean's face, sticking in Dean's stubble, his hand smoothing down Dean's side, rucking up his shirt. His hips grinding down and Dean can feel the length of him, hard, harder even than the first time Dean had touched him, down in the kitchen. Hard for him.

It's an assault and Dean is drunk with it, beside himself, his hands unable to settle, his brother's whole body here for the touch: the long curve of his neck, the breadth of his shoulders, the sway of his spine. He tastes like Dean. He feels like nothing on earth. Dean gets a handful of his ass and he bucks down into Dean, hungry and awkward and almost painful. Dean tilts his chin down, ducks away from Sam's following mouth so he can get the words out.

“You ever done this before?”

Sam shakes his head and Dean thinks there might be nervousness in it. He cups Sam's face and thumbs his cheekbones, gentling. It's okay, it's okay. Dean's got him, it's gonna be fine. 

Sam lets him do that a while, settle back in the dark and run his fingertips over Sam's skin, the unforgettable rise and fall of his brother's jaw, his brow. And when Sam tires of waiting and comes for him again he lets Sam take what he wants, lifts his arms so Sam can pull his shirts off and lies back down, lets Sam kiss him ceaselessly, over him, big hands finding every inch of Dean's skin and wherever he touches Dean feels it like a brand, hot and raw, like his body would tear itself apart to follow his brother. The glide of his wet mouth as Dean fights to keep up with his lips, his tongue, breathing harsh through his nose and it's too dark, like sensory deprivation, overwhelming, panic tripping every alarm system he has.

“Wait, wait,” he gasps, and pushes Sam up, wriggles.

“No Dean come on,” Sam says, practically a whine, pulling at him, making him burn again. Dean sits up further and stretches over to turn the lamp on, dim and shitty like everything else in their lives but it reveals the flush of Sam's face to him, the dark damp of sweat at his hairline, his swollen mouth. Sam's eyes run over him and he's naked and exposed and he gulps, some kind of self-awareness coming back to him now. The light puts a gulf back between them. This wasn't what Dean meant. He just wanted to see his brother.

“Sorry.”

Sam seems mildly outraged.

“Don't apologise.”

Dean stares at him a while longer. He's breathing like Dean's run him hard. He's gorgeous. Dean's never seen anything like him.

“Well, this is awkward.”

Sam rolls his eyes and pulls him in then with a hand around the back of Dean's head, a long melting kiss that Dean closes his eyes for. The slide of his tongue and heat, Sam pressing him back down. Dean tightens his fingers in his brother's hair and tips his head back and lets Sam mouth down his neck, suck again on his hammering pulse. It drives Dean crazy, down to every last searching cell of his body, pushing up off the bed into his brother and he needs to – he feels blind-sided, he needs to get a hold of himself but it works, shockingly, unthinkably, they're working together like they're made for it.

He pulls Sam's shirts off. Unbuckles Sam's belt and takes the opportunity to grope him through his jeans. Sam drops his head to the pillow, thrusts into his hand and groans into his ear and it feels so good Dean echoes it, rumbling deep in his chest.

“You want this,” Sam pants, edge of wonder in his voice. It's not a question. He raises his head a little, catches Dean's eye. “I thought you didn't. For the longest time. But you do.”

Dean freezes, his hand still on his brother's dick. Quailing lurch in his stomach.

“What do you want?” Sam asks, hushed. 

Dean swallows. 

“Whatever you want.”

Sam leans back, his weight on Dean's thighs. Holy fire in his eyes. His little brother.

“Tell me.”

“I never. I never thought about it.”

“Yes you did.”

“I never got this far.”

“Yes you did.”

Dean's throat closes over again. His skin prickles, stretched too tight.

“Come here,” he says, hoarse, and reaches out a hand, hooks Sam's shoulder, reels him back in and Sam makes an exasperated face like he knows what Dean wants anyway and is willing to forgive his inability to say so. Braced on his elbows, above Dean again, his biceps are huge on either side of Dean's shoulders and he kisses Dean sloppily, words falling out his mouth.

“I did – I did do this before – at school – sometimes after – just hands – they didn't – I couldn't pretend--”

“Fuck,” Dean gasps, wrecked at the thought of it, and flips them, kneels forward between Sam's spread thighs, plants a heavy hand on his chest and looks him in the eye.

“Stay.”

Sam nods mutely, stunned, his arms sprawling across the mattress. Dean gets up and fishes in the pocket of his jeans for a condom, his bag for lube, drops them on the sheets next to Sam's hip and pulls Sam's boots and jeans off in one long move as Sam grunts and lifts his hips up, shoves at his boxers to help Dean get rid of them too. The sight of Sam’s dick bobbing, his heavy balls, it gives Dean too many ideas and he shakes his head, kneels back between his brother's legs and grabs his hands, moves them up to the rails of the bed head, presses them there until Sam gets the point and grabs on. 

Dean pulls at Sam’s hips, hitches until Sam is stretched out under him, legs bent so that his calves don't dangle off the edge. Colour vivid on Sam's cheeks, laid out for Dean like this, his eyes huge, mouth a tremulant line, deathly serious. Dean could look at him all day, Christ, he could call this the end of his life and be happy: Sam's broad chest with its scruff of hair, the wave of his ribs and the tensed muscles in his belly, the darker hair there leading down and his dick red and straining, needing to be touched, and kneeling over him Dean feels a huge smash of joy: the power he has. Good power. Nothing bloody about this, nothing vicious. Just him and his brother. World-beating.

He fits Sam's dick to his hand and jacks him gently a couple of times, makes Sam gasp like he's been punched and bite his lip, his knees falling open further, hips jerking up. Dean takes that as a sign and grabs the lube. 

He tries Sam with a single finger at first, keeps his left hand moving on Sam's dick and his eyes on Sam as Sam stares down his own body, down where Dean's busy, a faint frown of concentration on his face but no surprise. His brother is not new to this feeling, Dean realises, with a staggering pulse of arousal. Other men – women – maybe Sam has done this to himself. Fucking himself. Maybe thinking of Dean.

“Jesus, Sammy,” he says, and breaks on his brother's name, folds forward and rests his forehead on Sam's chest as Sam shifts and presses to take more of his finger. He's so tight. Someone moans. He can't tell who.

“Another,” Sam says, frayed, and Dean gives it to him, sits back up and works him with both hands, watches it take him over, his eyes squeezing shut, pleasure or pain on his face Dean can't tell but that's when it's good, he knows, that's when it's real good and it makes Dean ache, in his balls, his dick, his hopeless heart. Beyond Dean's imagining that Sam could look ever like this, that Dean would ever get to see it. He's sweating now, they both are, bright sheen lighting Sam up. Dean remembers when his brother had miles of golden skin. He's pale and bony now. He's still beautiful. 

“You're underground too much.”

Sam gapes at him a little before his brain seems to kick in, his hips still shifting helplessly between Dean's hands. “I'm working.”

“You're gonna turn into a mole.”

“Your...face...is gonna – fuck, shut up, Dean,” Sam gasps, and Dean laughs, grabs the condom.

“No,” Sam says, before he even gets it open, and the laughter dies in Dean's chest. “I don't want it.” 

“Sam.”

“I'm clean.”

Dean smiles at him.

“I don't care about that.”

“I know you are too.”

“No you don't.”

“Yes, I do.” 

“Sam, I – ” Dean doesn't know what to do with this faith. He's clean, of course he's clean, he's never been dumb enough to take risks with his sexual health but it's a long time since he's been anything but tainted and foul. He doesn't know how Sam could look at him and see anything else.

Sam's eyes crease with scorn and impatience.

“Just do it, Dean,” he says, alive, and God help him Dean does, crooks an arm under Sam's knee to stretch him out and sets a hand by his shoulder and presses into him, pain and awe flashing across Sam's face, his body giving way steadily until Dean's buried in him, and he's so tight and there are waves of tension rolling through him that Dean feels around his dick, so exquisite it nearly finishes him off right there.

“Breathe,” he gasps, doesn't even know who he's directing it at, and as he watches Sam obeys, returns to himself, relaxing muscle by muscle. He looks up at Dean, blown out, an absolute mess, a grin starting up around his mouth. 

Dean leans down and kisses him filthy and wet; fucks him with a slow ruthless slide in and out until he's whimpering, frantic. It's as good as anything Dean's ever had and then at some point out of time it gets better and they both loose it, madness taking hold, Sam's neck bent back and his arms stretched up, white-knuckle grip, muscles bunched to stop himself being pushed up the bed. There for the taking, and Dean takes him. 

Spits on his palm and jacks Sam awkwardly between their bellies as Sam brings a hand down, hooks his elbow around Dean's neck and presses their faces together, too gone now for kissing, just Sam's lips shaping words against his cheek, soft pant of _yeah yeah, come on, come on, Dean_ , desperate, fucking desperate for him and that's what puts Dean over the edge, this bottomless pit of desperate need opening up between them, it's true, it's still there, he didn't ruin it, that's one thing he didn't do, Sam still loves him.

He comes, deep inside his brother, and it fucks with his rhythm, pressing in as hard as he can get and Sam cries out and wraps his hand around Dean's where Dean is shirking his jerk-off duties, a couple of quick pulls and he's coming too but Dean has his eyes squeezed shut and he doesn't see it, just feels it, bloodwarm across his fingers, in the clench around his dick, Sam's caught breath, the vast strain of his body.

“Oh, _goddamn_ ,” Sam says, on a long ragged sigh, awed and simple, and Dean's strength fails. He collapses down with an _oof_ , face buried in the salt of Sam's neck, Sam's solid chest heaving underneath him as their breathing slows. It takes a while. Dean's buzzing all over, tired in a tender pleasant way he hasn't been in years, it feels like; his heart is still thumping. He doesn't know if it will ever return to normal. He smiles and noses at Sam's skin.

Sam runs his hand languidly up and down Dean's spine, scratches gently at his scalp, tipping his head a little so he can press kisses to Dean's hairline. Dean can feel the curve of his lips.

“Where have you been all my life?” Sam murmurs, something pure and light in his voice, the sound of God, Dean thinks crazily, the sound of all good things in the world and like that Dean is unmade, gutted sharp and cruel, wrenched up and away to the edge of the bed, his head ringing like he's been boxed about the ears. His muscles have set up a fine liquid tremor. He curls his arm around his belly, eyes burning. It hurts to breathe. 

What is he doing.

Where he's been, where he's going, what he is. Nothing changes. 

This is not for him. 

Sam pats him lazily on the back a couple of times and Dean throws a leaden smile over his shoulder and gets up stiffly, thighs still trembling. He wipes himself down with the hand towel from the bathroom, tosses Sam a t-shirt. Sam grabs for it and misses, chuckles, drowsy and fuck-happy.

They sleep in the other bed, Sam wincing a little as he turns to switch off the lamp and hop over. 

“You'll be fine,” Dean tells him as he drapes a heavy arm over Dean's stomach, and Sam mutters _I know_ in a tiny irritated voice that buries its way into Dean, takes up a sharp and proud little spot right next to his heart.

He had this, he thinks. What he is, and he still got to have this. He couldn't ask for more.

Sleep comes for him sooner than he'd like.

He wishes he'd seen Sam's face.

::

It's pitch black when he wakes, panic flutter until he sees the alarm's faint red numbers, still long before dawn. Sam is snoring behind him, back pressed against Dean's.

The bathroom is decrepit and the light is yellow and dull. 

He washes his face. In the mirror he looks at himself, blooming with spots and stains. He blinks, scrubs at his face. They don't go away.

The bed is a tangle in the corner of his eye.

::

The car still has the night's chill but there's a grey glow to his left and after half an hour he crosses the Rio Grande and tracks it down, spotty clouds kindling pink and white until the sun clears the horizon and starts forcing the day on all of them.

Two-lane blacktop country, spare as the moon, the kind of road he could drive in his sleep, Metallica in the tape deck but he doesn't feel like listening; he silences it. The highway splits as he gets closer to Roswell and the traffic increases. He finds a faded road to his left and keeps going. 

Ranchland now or reservation or empty, ancient and speckled. People devoting sixty years of their life to this one spot, pulling life out of the dust. The asphalt rolls thinner and thinner under him and, after he passes one final bleached house, turns to dirt. 

Something about the road noise flashes him back to running alongside as Sam learned to ride a bike, wobbling on an old junkyard skeleton. That was in one of the Carolinas. Roads around the quarry, Sam coming off on to the gravel a couple of times when he'd shoot ahead and Dean couldn't catch him, but he always got back on, blood on his elbow, his knees, swiping hair out of his eyes. Dean had been so proud of him.

The road deteriorates at the same speed as his sight. He drives until he can't anymore; finds a place to pull over. Pops the glove box, gets out and leans on the hood. The engine ticks under him, steady as a metronome. 

Bit of a wind today, brisk. He turns the collar of his jacket up.

In the old Westerns they used to film night scenes in the day and then mess with the colours. That's what it's looking like now. The light shining wrong and inverted and carbon-paper blue. Interesting to see it from this side. Not as alarming as he thought it might be, going by the faces of the things he's been killing lately.

He turns the gun in his hands and smooths his thumb over the ivory. He's had it a long time, always got a kick out of the envious looks people gave him when they got a hold of her nickel plating, the engraving. He'd lifted this one from a hunter, a game hunter not a real hunter, dead in his own home. Dean can't remember how anymore. He doesn't think he shot him, but who keeps track these days.

Tickle in the back of his mind, a low drone. A warning.

He could have left something for Sam, he thinks belatedly. All he has is the car and the gun, but they're a bit – Sam might not want them now. But it would have been nice to find a way to say thank you.

There are flies crawling him already, tiptoeing across his fingers, landing on his lips. He waves them away. Fucking desert. 

The midges are back in force, fuzzing and alive in the black. 

His hands are too heavy. It's a puzzle. He was counting on a minimum of fuss. He was counting on some ease and relief and the smooth familiar action of his Colt but his hands are too heavy; or she's too heavy. She's got real bullets, no need for salt or silver. Not much of their usual line out here. Not enough people to bring the rot with them. Ghosts, mostly, he'd guess. He's burned a few ranchland spirits over the years. They fight hard. So little to cling on to out here. When you're just one thing it can take you over pretty easily.

Someone's coming. 

The drone's turned into engine noise. The wind brings it to him for a full further minute before the car's upon him, gasping crunch of gravel under unstable wheels. Then a long pause, like the car brought itself here. 

He's pretty exposed, like this. It's a strange feeling. Been a long time since he had to worry, or bothered worrying. He leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees and it puts him in mind of a picture he saw once, Abel with the back of his neck bent and bare, his murderer reared above. Blade or bullet or Darkness, something's always on its way. 

Thunk of a door, finally, and footsteps that stop beside him. The front of his baby dips to accept extra weight, muttering greetings in squeaks and groans. Dean keeps his head down. Words swell and burn in his throat. His lips tremble. 

Look at what I am, he wants to say. 

It hurts too much. He scuffs his boot in the dirt instead, connects with a stone, sends it skittering across ground he can't see. What is he going to do. What is there to do, in the hollow dark.

He went swimming in an old gravel quarry once. At night. He was nineteen. The girl had met him there and then chickened out after second base: teacher's daughter, she did the best she could. He lay alone on the blanket a while. Some bird trilling and moaning; frogs having a wild spring time. Ten miles out of town with the milky way sitting in the black still water. He went in as well, naked, water body-warm like it was alive. Broke up the stars, splashed through the moon. Tried to touch the bottom and failed. Floated on his front, spreadeagled, counting seconds. Floated on his back, eyelashes heavy, raising and lowering his arms through the skin of the water, ducking his chin to fill his mouth and send whale spouts into the air.

He'd floated long enough to start thinking crazy thoughts, like how the sky looked like a cymbal shimmer or how he was an eye in the lake the same way the moon and the stars were a million eyes above him, staring at each other, forming each other in absolute ignorance, in infinite variety and possibility, impersonal and timeless. If he bent his body slowly at the waist, tried to arrow himself down into the deep he started sinking but the second he moved the vast weight of water below pushed him back up, held him there, whole and beyond and bigger than his duty, bigger than himself, bigger than all the things he'd tried to be and couldn't be. He was nineteen. He'd been hunting for ten years. He had a little brother who he loved.

“Dean,” Sam says, croaky but sure, and Dean lifts his head towards his brother's voice. He feels the sun on his face.

::

The end. 

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/139875458311/the-butcher-33899-words-by-nigeltde-chapters)


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